Ask Luna #172

From: Kevin

Do you think diviners may have an affinity to bond with imbued items and/or using Elsewhere? The only reason I ask is because I think divination is one of the few magic types that doesn’t directly affect the physical world, and Alex and Richard seem to be the top wielders of imbued items/otherworldy powers. Maybe diviners can access the spirit world better because of their mindset?

Or another possibility is you know how fire magic is terrible at defense yet Landis as far as we know has the best defensive magic in Great Britain? Do you that the best mages are ones who take their magic types weakness, fire’s lack of defense, diviners lack of directly affecting the world and through skill/determination/sacrifice are able to drastically improve their strength?

Sorry if that last part is completely obvious but I guess it’s kinda of like lifting a thousand pounds with your bare hands, simple but almost impossible to do because as far we know no other fire mage comes close to Landis’s defensive skill, and all the other diviners seem to be information gatherers.

But in any event do you think both parts of my question has some truth to them or am I just overreaching?

I don’t think Alex is good with imbued items and in Elsewhere because he’s a diviner, I think he’s good at those things because he’s Alex. As in, it’s because of the person he is, not because of the powers he has. Though he has those powers because of the person he is, so . . . maybe very indirectly? But as far as I understand it, he got those particular skills just by practising a lot and being willing to do some pretty weird and dangerous stuff that most mages wouldn’t touch.

And I don’t actually know if Landis has a special talent for defence. It’s more like he’s just really quick and practised and efficient, so he can block attacks that would get through against anyone else.

So I think it’s more that, if you want to keep on getting better, you eventually have to address the stuff you’re bad at and either focus on that until you’re good at it, or find a way to make it not matter.

From: Michael

Why don’t guys have a stash of IV glucose solutions on hand?

Anna can pretty much heal anything, maybe not cancer the way she described her life magic to work (although if she could manipulate the bahviour of NK white cells even that isn’t off the table), but anything trauma related if she gets to it fast enough you will live.

The only problem being that she needs energy for the healing to take place. For that she usually uses the energy of the body she is healing, and her own. The energy we are talking here about appears to be organic in nature – since people she helped heal are always thirsty and hungry, signs of intense metabolic processes.

A 5% glucose solution is, besides the 0,7% NaCl solution the most common used IV drip you can get and it solves both problems – it safely hydrates the body while providing energy. You can get it without a prescription in any pharmacy, and putting in an IV can be learned in 20 minutes.

It is the easiest solution to the most basic problem they meet when dealing with heavy injuries, especially when they consider Anne. So why not?

Honest answer? I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about glucose solutions or how the body processes energy, so it never occurred to me to ask.

If I had to guess, it might be because there’s something about glucose solutions that doesn’t help very much for some life-mage reason I wouldn’t know about. But it might also be because that’s just not how Anne learned how to do it. It’s actually a really common thing with mages. They learn some specific way to do a spell, and then they stick with it. So maybe when Anne was learning to heal she didn’t have glucose solutions around, so she developed her own ways to recover her energy and the patient’s energy with just regular food, because that was what she had and that was what she had to make work.

Or maybe not. It’s not like I can really ask her these days.

From: jamescagney22

So I am just following off the question asked by Geli in 166, about Richard not keeping Alex close despite putting all that effort into training him. Now Geli has a good point about Alex being a backup/legacy in case Richard fails with his power grab but I think now that we know Richard is a diviner it could be something related to their magic type.

I get the feeling that Richard has a lot of respect for Alex in the sense that he is very capable with his magic/getting results and thus he doesn’t feel the need to micromanage like he seems to with Deleo. So as long as Alex is working towards his ends he does not have to be on his side per se… until events in Burned and Fallen forced Drakh’s hand. Plus as a fellow diviner perhaps he figures that giving Alex a freer hand will get a better result then if he tried to use more forceful measures… which backfired on him in tremendously in Fallen.

So my questions are

A. Are diviners typically loners/work best with their magic when they are left alone? I know this might seem obvious but Alex and to an extent Richard are well rather social/politically active that is is hard to see that.

B. Do you think diviners have a different view of time then everyone else has? By that I mean do you think seeing the future makes the short and long term future more fluid in the mind of a diviner? Hence Richard waiting for Alex a few years to join him would be no different then it would be yesterday? I hope I am phrasing this right.

Yeah, the way Alex explained it was that from Richard’s point of view, he’d won against Alex every time before, so when Alex showed up for what was the twentieth time or whatever, Richard just let things play out because he was confident that he’d win again.

Oh, right, the questions.

For A, yes, definitely. Alex is more of an introvert than pretty much anyone I know. Back when I first knew him, I think I was basically the only person he talked to besides Arachne. Even when he got into politics, he was never that comfortable with the social side of things, and after a work day, he’d want to go off on his own to recharge.

For B, no. I mean, they do see the future differently in their weird diviner way, but Alex gets bored and gets tired of waiting just the same as everyone else. I think Richard being willing to wait so long is because he’s just really patient.

From: Allison

Hey Luna I was watching Avatar the Last Airbender the other day and I was curious if some Elemental Mages had some overlap. Specifically…

1. Have you heard of any Fire Mages who could also use Lightning?

2. Do Water Mages have any healing abilities whether it is only on themselves or if they could also heal other people.

3. Can Earth Mages also manipulate metal or other materials like plastic, rubber etc…

Sorry if these are off base just thought it would be interesting if there was some connection!

Heh. Yeah, I remember when that came out. I think I’d have really liked it as a kid.

1. No, fire mages don’t get to be lightningbenders. You’d think there’d be some overlap, but there isn’t much of one, beyond the usual edge cases. I think it’s because they do such similar things.

2. Water magic can’t heal, but it’s sort of healing-adjacent, if you know what I mean. When you do get elemental-life hybrids, it always seems to be water that’s the element they can use.

3. For metal, sometimes. Metal mages are their own type, but earth and stone and metal mages are all in the same sub-family and they overlap a lot. I’ve never heard of them having any kind of connection with rubber, though.

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