Heeey roo!! In the captain skizz series - why couldn't Impulse feel Skizz's magic?
Also what was up with the tentacles? And Skizz's eyes?
-makes a 'I see what you did there' face-
Okay SO.
As established in the cap'n Skizz shorts, Skizz is a magic user- specifically, he's a nyxmancer or more casually a shadowmancer, they mean the same thing.
Darkness magic.
Not like 'the darkness in a human's soul' or anything I mean literal, actual darkness. Opposite of light. In the canon of the AU it's a form of magic that is old and far out of favor, since its use contributed to what I am calling the Abyssal Calamity that wiped out the Lehman Kingdom roughly 250ish years before the story starts.
Impulse was unable to sense Skizz's magic because he wasn't trained to, see again: obscure form of magic no longer in use.
Skizz, like any good nyxmancer, keeps his magic in his shadow. Magical coat? The signature's in the shadow. Active spell? Radiating from the shadow. Got the equivalent of a hidden magical speaker blasting 'wonderwall' at 1200 decibels? Check! That! Shadow!!!
And make sure you check all of them.
Because Skizz has more than one.
That's putting the cart before the horse, though, so- Skizz and that whole being blind thing. How can he see?
Well, when he's on board the Shadow, the ship herself acts as his eyes- that's the tentacle that affixes to the back of his head. Realistically just standing on the deck or being within a few feet of the ship would grant Skizz the ability to see, but the Shadow is a touchy feely jealous lady. Hence the magic head-based umbilical cord. It can't be cut except through great magical effort and it phases through solid objects, so it doesn't hinder Skizz's movement at all. It's just, you know, real fuckin' weird to look at.
Ah, but what about when he isn't on the ship? When he's wearing a covering over the pits where his eyes were?
We come again to shadows. Skizz can sense and 'see' the presence of any shadow cast by a solid object. He uses that knowledge to build a mental map of what is around him, and move accordingly. It's an imperfect system, since shadows are unless magically influenced two dimensional castings of things existing in a four dimensional space. Skizz has had centuries of practice but that doesn't mean the occasional weirdly placed chair doesn't mess him up.
It also means that in a completely dark room, or at night, Skizz can 'see' damn near perfectly. Cloudy and rainy days nerf his not-sight sight significantly, as does snowy weather.















