sentryworks

[sentryworks]

January 6

Contemporary Magic: Doppelgangers and Homunculi, two names for a similarly crafted golem. While scholars would probably argue of the differences, they remain slight enough to fudge outside of the context of academic papers. Composed of flesh-like materials and instilled with the thought processes of a human, a Homunculus exists as a man-made human. Possessed of the typical human drives, it is capable of sustaining itself through consumption, respiration, and circulation. The precise workings of these processes is quite dissimilar to a human due to the needs of a constructed golem, but they ultimately occur in a visibly similar fashion.

Homunculi in records were originally created as an experiment on the upper limits of what a golem could possibly be. The practice, unsurprisingly, was buried under witch hunts among many other old applications of focus. Its re-emergence in contemporary history is surprising, given the rather strict enforcement placed on golemancers by the Old Guard in its efforts to protect the arts of focus from scrutiny by society at large. One of few Homunculi currently known active resides at Grand Fields Academy of the Arts as a student under direct permission from Headmaster Samantha White.

Unlike most golems, Homunculi possess the ability to shift their appearance due to their clay-like structure, thus their conflation with Doppelgangers. While a generally minor characteristic utilized more often to display the process surface-level aging as the inner structure of the Homunculus grows and ages similar to a human, this shapeshifting ability may be used subconsciously to adapt the Homunculus' body to those it interacts with in an attempt to attain and retain acceptance. These changes are often subtle and slow, but when used to rapidly accommodate people the Homunculus meets the shift may be noticeable and off-putting. Pressure placed on the Homunculus to adapt to a situation rarely results in them turning at the chance, being absent the human emotion and capabilities that would produce feelings of anxiety or similar disorders. Despite their divergent behavior in comparison to humans, a properly formed Homunculus looks and behaves very much like a human, with any oddities in their behavior often adding to the image of an imperfect human rather than a more robotic image of perfection.

Despite a composition of inanimate material, Homunculi are plenty capable of focus. The long-standing theory on this explains that their elemental nature allows them to exercise a sense of familiarity with their focus, though golems composed of similar materials lack this ability. Another theory points toward the free, human-like will of a Homunculus, but this fails to account for the dramatically varied ability of non-human fauna to manipulate foci. The limited number of Homunculi and the shrinking number of academics studying the field of golemancy on the whole suggests a proper answer is in the distant future at best.

[sentryworks]

January 5

Contemporary Magic: Focus is the generally accepted term for the method by which those capable perform feats of 'magic'. While applicable in an extremely wide array of uses, focus can be broken down to a simple and straightforward basic action. The manipulator latches onto a point of variable size and manipulates it via force. Most are incapable of parsing the world in terms of points of focus, and without proper study the few who are able may simply never pick up the ability and live their lives absent of it.

The applications of focus are exceedingly wide and pointless to record in short, but allow for a much more broad manipulation of the world. From actions as minor as the movement of an object at a distance to as major as the separation and realization of the concepts of mythology which created the realm of demons from the collective storytelling of humans over the years, the limits of focus seem to be less of a knowable quantity and more a restriction of the human mind and body.

Manipulation of focus tends to be separate from bodily motion, operated not quite by thought but seemingly by force of will. A select few people are capable of grasping foci with their own bodies, though this poses hefty limitations compared to the more free-form application of will in exchange for an ability to pull at foci with their physical strength. Vanishingly few are capable of focus through both force of will and physical force, with the number of people in recorded history numbering in the single digits. Recorded history is imperfect, especially when it comes to the more generally hidden topic of focus, but the expected number would remain similarly minuscule.

[sentryworks]

January 4

Contemporary Magic: Succubi, traditionally known as night-stalking demons of sexual desire, are among many of the families of greater demons that remain misunderstood by the general public. As with all demons, they take the form that human thought and stories have shaped them into, thus their human appearance. However, demons lack defined innards. Dissection of most greater demons simply turns up a collection of unidentifiable black mass underneath the surface. Demonic mass appears to react differently pending the demon it composes, while being able to falsify internal processes in order to keep up appearances, such as consumption of food and respiration.

Succubi in particular react to positive emotions. Sexual intercourse often results in a spike of these emotions, though most succubi avoid it in reality. The toxic and clingy behavior of many in these situations often leaves succubi drained by the resulting flood of negative emotions. Most succubi hiding among the general human population take to charity and volunteer work as an excuse to reside within human society without detection while serving their needs. Nothing is taken from those the succubi interacts with, a purely mutualistic relationship. While difficult to discern the actual effects of negative behavior on succubi without proper study, they tend to state that such is draining and runs counter to their needs.

Like most greater demons, Succubi are capable of the manipulation of focus in a fashion similar to that of humans. That one would attend an academy to learn the arts is less than surprising, though the old myths tend to put such students under undue scrutiny by their peers.

[sentryworks]

January 3

Late-Modern Commerce: Between the Royalty and the Trade Guild, there's few options worth taking. A renewed push by the Trade Guild to position the Royalty into checkmates and slowly force the monarchies to cede power to the increasingly large union of traders would, on its surface, seem like a positive turn for the citizens of our grand country. Power corrupts, of course, and few in the Guild had intentions more honorable than the procurement of extended trade deals to begin with. A movement against the lukewarm War of Words would require a large-scale revolution to make any real dent, however, and it becomes difficult to find much to run a revolution with when one lacks the support of both the Royalty and the Trade Guild.

Others have bigger fish to fry. The dark matter beings often called Skewers remain under a witch hunt propagated by an old misunderstanding in a translation of religious texts passed through the Royalty's line, deeming these entities said to be composed of the building blocks of the world, from which the First Human pulled free each and every other living thing which in turn shaped the dark matter into the world as we know it, as dangerous demons which seek to break the world back down to its pre-Emergence state. This, of course, is patently false, but false information sticks in those who wish to believe it.

Felidae, Canidae, Avae, among the other kind said to have been pulled free from the malleable world by the First Human, each hold a rapidly diminishing standing amongst the greater cities under the Royalty, simply due to a generational shift which reads the Emergence as a tale showcasing the innate importance of their own kind, rather than the story of one collaborative community despite its faults that it truly exists as. Left with little choice inside of the holdings of the monarchies, these kind rely on the growing force of the Trade Guild to dig their foothold into society. The increasing diversity of the Trade Guild holds little impact on the War of Words, despite what some of the more zealous of the Royalty might preach. Ultimately, the Royalty and the Trade Guild hold dramatically less sway over the country at large than they might think. Short of a pogrom or a mass hoarding of goods against actual profit, the squabbles of the monarchies and unions are little more than background dressing, sometimes edging into short-term community burdens when they boil over.

Without the War of Words, our Princess and her crew would have likely never stoked the flames of the revolution. One push too many and an expected shortsightedness led a union head to adequately fund and arm one crafty woman and shove her past her patience, and with that the monarchies and unions both began to fall in turn as the War of Words shifts into a military conflict. If the Princess has her way, the losses of the Trade Guild and the Royalty land in synchronicity, a crumbling of the old and the new alike without a large enough presence to reasonably pin it on short of each other. The spite she holds for the systematic destruction of her old way of life by the War of Words fuels the revolution nearly singularly. The tide of war may turn out of the Princess' calculations with the intervention of other countries, though neither side seems willing to give the foreign lands their share of power as payment. Greedy to the end.

[sentryworks]

January 2

Kind-of Cyberpunk: Training of high ranking members of Central Boston's law enforcement requires an excessive amount of time and effort, making any losses devastating to the organization. With recent revolutions in many facets of biotech, Central Boston invested heavily into something many thought was a pipe dream.

Genetic manipulation of the human organs to render them each self-sufficient and rapidly regenerative gave way to a sort of super-soldier that would take a deadly shot and drag its body along with the offputting tentacular connective mass that now grew within them. Near-singularity quantities of breakthroughs in the implementation of subdermal living electronics created another type of immortal, with fatal injuries simply reversing themselves over a short period of time more cleanly and quickly than the genetic manipulations, though without the same ability to push through as the body falls apart before it can restore itself.

Implementation of artificial intelligence in potent robotic shells created a similar sort of immortal, though not desired among the leads making the decisions on Central Boston's law enforcement. Legal and physical repression of these AI became commonplace as few felt comfortable with the idea of a machine cult, though these AI in practice were entirely independent and almost always more concerned about more basic issues of human life and behavior rather than the secretive inner workings of the law, largely because they had no reference for such things without available and circulated references to learn from. The persecution of AI largely boiled down to the scrapping of found suspects. Disgraced Lieutenant Barrel, a genetically manipulated point gunner, along with a Greater Boston law operative sniper implanted with a colony of electronics and a moderate Angelic field-use mutation, worked together to ensure the safety of one such AI after determining the machine not only less-than-harmful in behavior but also subject to elicting more danger to others in hunting it than if it were left alone.

The ensuing implementation of immortality by these methods amongst those outside of enforcement services rapidly resulted in riots by the public and genetic deterioration of those patients. Further studies and large-scale rioting led to the burial of the immortality projects, including within law enforcement.

[sentryworks]

January 1

Fantasy: Magic's hard to learn, and committing yourself to it requires not just a heavy amount of dedicated study. Students of full on magic have to put themselves through a very extreme method to be able to actually utilize magic in an exact and wide context. Learning a trick or two would be difficult, but manageable.

A major, old-fashioned method of learning a wide school of magic involves binding oneself to a grimoire. The student clears their mind entirely as they fall asleep, and when they wake and touch their grimoire the contents flood back into them, both the techniques and knowledge of magic as well as their memories of life. This clearing of excess memory allows the student a clarity of mind that promotes a learning track of magic which higher scholars have deemed reasonable, though some believe that this separation from humanity is not only excessive in the pursuit of a manufactured moving goalpost, but also inefficient due to its ignorance of the importance people place on seemingly minor touchstones of their life. The ability to selectively craft a person into something very specific and opt out of undesirable behaviors and knowledge appeals to many tired of difficult students, and outside of the typical social pressures of a teaching relationship students find little wiggle room to commit to a decision making process around rejecting the practice due to an inability to accrue minors thoughts and decisions about the system over time.

The high maintenance of this method has it falling out of favor naturally, with many teachers unwilling to deal with the hurdles inherent to it. MacKenzie and the Alchemist are one of the last apprenticeships utilizing this method that remain as industrial progress continues to obsolete the extensive learning process and dangerous limits associated with full magic schooling.