brace for pact

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header is by Ichthida on reddit and icon is by Joshthulhu on deviantart

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the boston molasses flood of 1919 briefly brought into existence the world's first and only molasses elemental

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i know wildbow will never do this, but imagine pyre starts and rose junior shows up having transed his gender (again) offscreen

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the mirror realm that blake and rose are in for most of pact is actually really interesting, because it's kind of like the opposite of a pocket realm. most pocket realms we've heard about, like theodora’s collection, demesnes, and knotted places, are relatively small but have a lot going on in them; the mirror realm on the other hand is almost completely dark and empty, but seems to connect to every reflective surface in the world. it seems unlikely that this realm was carved out specifically for blake and rose, given how big it is, and the fact that several others are able to enter it, including faerie and demons, with some like bloody mary seeming specifically adapted to the space. you could argue it's not even a realm so much as a very limited filter through which to view and interact with the world, but some major realms, like the spirit world and ruins, also function kind of like filters, mapping pretty directly to the mundane, physical world, with different features emphasized, and populated by specific types of others. i'd term realms like the mirror realm something like 'thin realms' or 'bare realms'.

mirrors, and mirror worlds, are a concept that have a fair amount of meaning in human thought, so it makes sense that a realm specifically highlighting them could exist. thinking of other features that could define an otherwise bare realm, that could form something coherent if everything else in the world were filtered out, that specific types of others could find a niche in, the first thing that comes to mind is something like the 'nowhere space' from hilda. it's made up of the combined unused space in a given human dwelling: the gap between furniture and floor or wall, the space inside a shelf when its drawers are pulled out, the back of a closet behind what's stored. outdoors, the realm becomes a massive, unnavigable void, as so much space is unused for human purposes, with no thresholds to subdivide it. in hilda, the indoor sections are mainly inhabited by nisse, house spirits, but in the otherverse i could see it also being home to the predatory monster under the bed and monster in the closet. this one almost exists as a counterpart to the ruins, where the denizens are mostly echoes and incarnations of human emotions and concepts, and areas of the landscape unvisited or uncared for by humans drop into nothingness.

other potential realms: the light, the world extending only as far as the light touches, changing with the passage of the sun and the flicks of switches, and its inverse, the dark, the shadow realm, inhabited by others to whom light is anathema. there could also be realms defined by life or lack of life, or realms inhabited by elementals that can only exist in bodies of water or near sources of heat. in fact, i think the digital aether is the most similar example in a known realm. originally, it might have existed as a bare realm of electrical impulses, with only the occasional flicker of lightning and animal nervous systems, but as the transfer of power and data along clear lines became so integral to human technology and culture, others began to fill the available niche, and the digital aether ascended into mainstream relevance among practitioners, or at least technomancers. 

sight also strikes me as relevant. the default for sight seems to be a view into the spirit world, layering that realm over the physical world as a filter that can be interacted with or adjusted to focus on whatever the practitioner chooses. the line between a thin realm being another level of reality or simply a way of perceiving the world might be academic; for a fish that can never breathe air or walk on land, what it can sense in the water might as well be all that exists in the world.

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had a dream that grandma rose and rose jr. were sharing an apartment after they left the rest of the family to fight over the house and inheritance, and blake was the name of their bonsai tree

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So would Gilkey be a Cockatrice in the making?

Sorry, completely forgot about this ask.

The similarities to Gilkey hadn't occurred to me when I was making the gorgon post, but you're right that he fits in a lot of ways. He's a distillation of potent poison in a vessel that's leaking and deadly to anyone who gets too close, and the poison can conduct along paths of least resistance and even along connections and practice. I think if I had to articulate a difference between Gilkey and what I was thinking of for gorgons, it's that his vessel has a constant slow leak, gradually affecting everything in his presence, and his power and self will likely be used up within years, whereas a gorgon might have a stronger container whose contents are under higher pressure, that only releases power in short, destructive bursts when disturbed, when a connection is made with an outside force, and they therefore take much longer to exhaust their reserves. I think what he was when he first appeared was similar to a gorgon, but the way things were trending he would have moved farther away from that as he weakened, rather than becoming more like one, and his fusing with the primordial has completely altered his trajectory. 

As for how a gorgon could be made - probably the most common way is as a divine creation, a god filling a vessel with their power and the power being too much for the vessel, but not so much as to immediately destroy the vessel. Alternatively, a knot created when energy from some natural source collected in an area that happened to form an almost perfect container, staying in balance but under great pressure, until someone unlucky stumbles into the area and gives a bolt of that energy somewhere to ground itself. A gorgon doesn’t necessarily have to be mobile, or alive. In fact, even gorgons that are alive probably have a lot of trouble moving without making some connection and losing a burst of their essence. Most gorgons would be sedentary, sitting at the center of a gradually accumulating statue garden of their victims. Practitioners could potentially create gorgons, intentionally or by accident, but it would take a lot of power, in a raw form that resists containment, and a container that was well made but with a small fatal flaw, that wouldn’t immediately shatter, or have a constant slow leak like Gilkey.

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Big fan of fantasy settings that turn classic monster types into more abstract archetypes that fit within the magic system.

Dragons in Pact aren’t just big magic lizards that sometimes fly or breathe fire, they have a specific place in the universe, with each one being an ouroboros, a perpetual motion machine, an infinite feedback loop of some kind of power, often but not necessarily elemental. A god that worships themself, a fire that burns itself as fuel, a spring that acts as its own water source, a battery that powers itself. They aren’t always reptilian, but default to forms reminiscent of dinosaurs as the last dominant group of organisms before the rise of mammals and humans. They’re one variation on a broader concept in the universe, of knots, places or beings or circumstances where the usual balances and flows of the universe have stopped working as they should. 

Bogeymen in Pact are a way of unifying the wide variation in specifics of horror movie monsters and slashers, preserving the uniqueness of each one while keeping the shared themes of fear and implacability and refusal to stay dead in the sequel; each one is someone who fell into the Abyss, a dimension that feeds on pain and fear and specializes in forcing its victims to sacrifice their humanity to improve their own situation, and got out by agreeing implicitly to become the Abyss’ agent in the mundane world, dragging more people down to keep themself afloat. 

@artbyblastweave also has a great non-Otherverse concept of Minotaurs emerging from mass death in a labyrinthine area. 

So I was thinking about Gorgons. There’s a lot of variation to this Greek myth, but the gist is that if someone looks at a gorgon, they turn to stone. Also they have living snakes for hair which is sick. The Basilisk and Cockatrice are other monsters that are usually described as having similar powers, though in some versions they poison or burn rather than petrify, and in others it’s what they look at that ends up poisoned/burned/petrified, instead of what looks at them. Also they tend to be more bestial and might incorporate some bird parts in addition to the reptile parts.

The reason for why they have this power ranges from “cursed by gods” to “they’re just like that”, but I think an interesting interpretation would be in a similar vein to Pact’s dragons. They’re beings that embody such a potent source of a particular element or substance or power, that they’re incredibly reactive or contagious, so much that even looking at them or being seen by them provides an avenue for their essence to cross and infect. They arise from too much power being forced into too small a container, until pressurized enough to burst out along any path of least resistance, rapidly conducting along any connection. The ‘snakes’ seen in some gorgons are in fact plumes of their energy leaking out, like the corona of a star, reptilian emission spectra. The heads of some gorgons may appear to those who manage to view them indirectly as like blooming flowers, bristling with invertebrate legs, pierced with spikes, or radiant with halos; these are only ever brief glimpses however, as even indirect viewers are almost immediately blinded. The ‘crown’ that gives basilisks (from basiliskos, ‘little king’) and cockatrices (spelling influenced by resemblance to a rooster’s comb) their names is the same phenomenon. 

‘Gorgon’ could be interpreted as specifically the stone or earth infused variant of this being, while ‘Basilisk’ could be fire and ‘Cockatrice’ poison, or they could all just be treated as interchangeable. A fire gorgon cause viewers to spontaneously combust, a water gorgon melts its spectators, to look on an air gorgon is to vaporize. Gorgons vary in power, and not all are able to instantly convert the whole body, but even the weakest are usually fatal due to the close proximity of eyes to brain. The victims that escape direct eye contact with only blindness or nonlethal brain damage are few and lucky. Even a reflection of some more powerful gorgons can be enough to turn eyes to stone or melt them out of their sockets. A potentially related phenomenon is seen elsewhere in Greek myth, with Zeus and Semele, and in the Bible, with Lot’s wife. While mortals gazing on Lovecraftian horrors may lose their minds, those who witness the true power of a god are annihilated or become a pillar of salt. 

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there was a post a while back about what kind of practitioners various parahumans characters would be, and i don’t think anyone mentioned the similarities between labyrinth and daniel alitzer. labyrinth’s power maps pretty directly to what daniel does when he gets access to glamour.

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a few rules we know about items chosen to be implements are that they shouldn’t already be magical, they shouldn’t be a very modern invention, they should be able to be carried easily, and they shouldn’t have too many moving parts. none of these are hard rules, but breaking any one of them will result in an implement that’s less generally powerful, although it might still be more useful for the particular role the practitioner intends for it. 

so, for example, a cursed amulet or magic sword fails the first rule, a rubik’s cube or fidget spinner fails the second, a statue or anchor fails the third, and a pocket watch or gun fails the fourth. a cell phone fails the second and fourth, a desktop computer fails the second, third, and fourth. 

laird behaim has a pocket watch for an implement. this would seem to fail the fourth, an unusual choice for the leader of a family that so highly values tradition and convention as a way of building and storing power, even compared to most practitioner families. it’s undeniably thematically appropriate for a chronomancer, and there aren’t many other fitting objects. water clocks and sundials generally fail the third, while an hourglass, a candle clock, or a simple enough astrolabe might serve, but none have quite the same function as a proper watch. still, it’s a tradeoff. 

laird’s watch isn’t just an implement, though. it’s also his familiar, a zeitgeist bound to it. a combined implement and familiar is also unusual, but it’s possible having a being able to move bound to an implement with moving parts compensates for the breaking of the fourth rule. also worth considering, the behaims aren’t just chronomancers. they’re really illusionists first and foremost. a pocket watch swung back and forth on a chain is the classic tool of the hypnotist, so laird’s implement functions in both aspects of his practice. 

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‘jinx’ has a few different interpretations outside of the otherverse

generic term for magic with a negative effect, same as curse or hex

making something less or more likely to happen by predicting it (’that’ll never happen’ ‘oh now you’ve jinxed it’)

getting one over on someone by saying something at the same time as them (jinx, you owe me a coke)

we’ve seen a few different ways in which practitioners can exploit the rules around truth and promises to get the universe to favor them. predicting an event or promising to do something gets the universe to make it easier to happen, at the risk of being gainsaid or forsworn if you fail to follow through. i propose ‘jinx’ as a term for this phenomenon particularly when used offensively, and ‘hijinx’ for the rare occasion when two opposing practitioners attempt this at the same time, which i assume would either cancel out or end up favoring the practitioner with better karma or a better claim on their predicted outcome.

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headcanon that finders are more likely than other practitioners to not choose an implement from one of the traditional archetypes and instead pick items that are for lack of a better word silly. things like boomerangs or croquet mallets or yoyos or butterfly nets or knitting needles. toys, sports equipment, or items that have a specific utility but not necessarily one that lends itself to traditional practice. my reasoning for this is that it’s a declaration of commitment to the whimsicality of the paths, forgoing a more dramatic or practical tool in favor of one that fits (or doesn’t fit) more with the bizarre juxtapositions the paths are full of. i think in the same vein as hazel and avery seem to do better on the paths by respecting and befriending the lost and not binding them or gamifying the boons, lost would be more willing to respect someone who’s not minmaxing their implement for utility or power but is instead choosing something unique and unexpected. it’s making a statement that you’re not totally serious, and are permanently including a little silliness in your practice. and i can see specific items actually being pretty effective on certain paths, like using a fishing rod to snag items or reel yourself over an obstacle, or using a pool cue to deflect debris or propel yourself on a path like falling oak avenue or the crash course. this also lets me justify avery taking a hockey stick or a lacrosse stick as an implement

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made a goblin name generator http://www.generatorland.com/usergenerator.aspx?id=27685