Ask Luna #5

From: Alex

Hello Luna,

Is there such a magic as Necromancy?

‘Necromancer’ is one of the names for a death mage, though I’ve got the feeling it’s not 100% correct (at least I remember someone getting corrected for using it).  I have the feeling necromancy is supposed to be a kind of ritual magic rather than a proper magic type, but for whatever reason they don’t teach us much about it.  Should probably ask Alex one of these days.  

From: Orion

Dear Luna, I think I remember Verus mentioning that magical creatures escaped to various worlds. What worlds are there and can mages go there?

We’re really getting to the limits of how much I know here . . . As I understand it the two main types of other worlds that get use by mages are shadow realms and bubbles.  Shadow realms are the most common and the easiest to create, and they’re something like a very small parallel world linked to a particular location on Earth.  Because they use a section of our world as a model they have to have some similarity with what they’re based on, but the mage who creates them can ‘tweak’ them, messing with the environment and the magical setup, that kind of thing.  

Bubbles are much rarer and the difference is that while a shadow realm is a kind of distorted image of a place in the real world, a bubble is completely cut off from our reality, so it can be whatever you like.  The problem is that bubbles have a tendency to ‘float off’ and once they do you can’t find them again.  

You can get to both bubbles and shadow realms via gate magic, but it’s harder than with normal gates and you can’t just walk to the initial staging point.  A lot of mages use focuses to make the journey easier.  

From: Orion

Dear Luna,

Can life mages regenerate limbs? And what is the strangest type of mage you have heard about or encountered?

Okay, I didn’t have any idea about the answer to the first question, so I asked Anne and I just learned more than I EVER wanted to know about limb regeneration.   

According to Anne, the basic answer is yes, but it’s difficult.  The easiest way to do it is if you’ve got the severed limb there already.  Anne says she can reattach a limb with pretty much 100% success rate – she says once you line up the nerves and the blood vessels it more or less fixes itself.  No, I have no idea how that works.  Yes, she sounded like she was talking from experience.  No, I didn’t ask.  

If the limb’s GONE gone, then according to Anne it’s much harder.  She says the problem is that human bodies don’t regenerate limbs naturally – your flesh regrows from scratch but your bones don’t, which means you’re trying to get the body to do something it doesn’t naturally do at all instead than enhancing what it can do already, which is apparently much more difficult.  It’s also more difficult the longer the limb’s been missing – something about the body and mind adapting to the loss.

Other issues with limb regeneration include the fact that not all life mages can do it – it’s a specialised skill that takes a lot of practice, and given that the best thing to practise on is a freshly severed limb you aren’t likely to get many volunteers.  Finally, regenerating a limb is really slow, takes a hell of a lot of energy, and has a whole variety of horrible things that can go wrong if you mess it up, such as the body deciding that the new limb’s a foreign object and the immune system attacking it and trying to destroy it.  (She described some other possibilities that were worse, but they were nauseating enough that I don’t really want to go into them.)   

So short answer, yes it’s possible, but don’t go counting on it.  

From: Bob

Hi Luna,

Okay so you get illusionist mages right? Are they mind mages altering what people see (or sense with their other senses) or do they actually creat something which isn’t really there? Would Illusions work on inanimate things like cameras?

Thanks. 

I actually did some research on this for a duel a while back, and it turns out the answer is ‘both’.   

Illusionists are kind of like a cross between light mages (not Light mages, light as in the stuff you get in a spectrum) and mind mages, except that their particular thing is tricking people.  Light-spectrum mages can create illusions out of visible light, and mind mages can mess with someone’s senses, but an illusionist can create a spell that does both.  They can create things that are just in your mind and that no-one else can see (which I think are called phantasms) but they can also do hologram-style constructs.  The first wouldn’t appear on cameras, the second would.  They can also mix the two, so you get something with real light but unreal sensations.  And then if they really want to mess with your head, they’ll set it up so that there are some real things in there too, so you don’t know which ones are the real ones.  

They’re kind of a headache to deal with.  I never did end up fighting the guy who I was doing the research for, but I’ll probably have to go up against one sometime.