Ask Luna #105

From: River

Hello Mage Vesta,

Firstly, while I’m sure you’re dealing with quite a bit as of late, I hope you’ve had at least some time to breathe and relax. Congratulations on your test, I’d be quite curious to hear more of how you completed it. It did not seem particularly enjoyable from an outside perspective.

Secondly, I was curious about something more historic. Have there been, or are there, any prominent/powerful/living dark emotion mages? My personal philosophy leans that way, at least compared to the light side, and it would seem likely for me to be an emotion mage if it’s tied so closely to personality. It’s just a bit off putting to think of my theoretical self as dead upon arrival so to speak. I’m sure Alex has had a good taste of that feeling too. Have you heard of anyone, past or present, like that?

Hope you and yours are doing well, and good luck with continuing to advance your magic.

I didn’t enjoy the test much, no, but to be honest what happened afterwards pretty much drove it all out of my mind. Got out wanting to celebrate and talk all about it, and found out that all of a sudden it didn’t matter any more.

And yeah, there are dark emotion mages, just like every other type, but they tend to make a lot of effort to stay under the radar. I know about maybe half a dozen Dark mages who are supposed to be enchanters, and in every case it’s a mixture of rumours and second-hand news. I’ve no idea which ones are the actual big fish.

From: Faragorn

I’m curious as to how water magic gets a disintegration beam. It is similar to how water can over time erode things, and if so, does the effectiveness vary depending on how resistant the target materials is to water erosion? For example Granite would be highly resistant.

Yup, I think that’s the theory. Anything that’s erosion-resistant is disintegration-resistant, and from what I’ve heard, if you want to make an anti-disintegration item, that’s the kind of material you want. Though a water mage can always just amp up the power, so ‘resistant’ isn’t necessarily going to be enough.

From: May

These are two totally unrelated questions and I am sorry for that. However they have been bugging me.
1) Do you think Alex is depressed?
2) Can Anne see people’s penis sizes?
Sorry for the personal touch, I was just curious. If you don’t want to answer you don’t have to, but thanks anyways.

1) I’m pretty sure he used to be (takes one to know one). He seems a lot happier now. Well, maybe not happy, but he’s a lot more engaged.
2) When it comes to people’s bodies, Anne can see literally everything. Inside, outside, you name it.

From: Arborden

Why hasn’t some enterprising mage made an annuler bullet? It just seems logical from a defense/military standpoint. It would defeat shields, and kill the underlying mage at the same time? Or a bullet laced with a life spell to kill etc, I’m sure they’ve made arrows with like spells in the old days. If the Light council is afraid to let something like that out, I’m sure a Dark Mage would jump at the chance we to make his troops, hirelings etc, deadly to Light Mages.

Someone’s been watching Fate/Zero.

Short answer is that an annuller spell won’t automatically dispel what it touches – it depends on how much power you put into it and how resistant the target is. It’s also possible to harden a spell against annullment effects. You get a whole rock/paper/scissors thing where mages balance the effectiveness of trying to dispel something against trying to bypass it or brute-force their way through.

But they probably wouldn’t use bullets in any case since it’s annoyingly difficult to tie any kind of decent spell into something so small (you run into mass/power limitations). An arrow would work better.