Ask Luna #48

From: Jeff

Hey Luna, I was wondering how you felt about Alex and Anne getting closer, I know you used to have feelings for him…

Complicated. Let’s leave it at that.

I guess if I had complete freedom to choose, I’d want things to work out for them. Whether they will or not . . . I dunno. I love Anne and she’s my best friend, but she’s got even more issues than Alex does. I’d be really afraid of what would happen if things went wrong.

From: They’retakingthehobbitstoIsengard

Hey Luna,

Alex or Batman, who do you think would win in a fight?

I’d back Alex, but I’ve never been much of a Batman fangirl.  Prefer Marvel.

From: Geli

Hi Luna,

how are you? I have wondered what exact the difference between your abilities and a true Chance mage are. Sure, a mage has a wider range, but what does that mean? What can your master do, that you can’t? Also, considering that spring is coming, I wanted to ask if you have a
favourite colour. Mine is yellow.

Geli

The difference is that I have to use my curse, but she can shape chance effects however she likes. My curse brings good luck to me and bad luck to everyone it touches, so if I want to do something, I have to figure out a way to make it fit with that. Like if I wanted to win at a casino game, I’d have to either use small targeted amounts of my curse on everyone else at the table, or figure out a way to ‘convince’ my curse that making the right number come up would actually help me. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t – my curse seems to be really good at understanding when something is dangerous, but trying to make it understand anything that doesn’t involve physical danger is a pain in the butt.

A chance mage could just mess with probability and make herself win. Or make someone else win, or make the house win – whatever she felt like. Much easier. So I could make someone else lose (easy), make myself win (harder) or make someone else win (REALLY hard, and I’d be fighting my curse the whole way), but for her, doing all three of those would be just as simple no matter which she picked.

Oh, and my favourite colour’s green.

From: AcrossThePond

Dear Luna,

If you’ll indulge my curiosity, I’ve got a couple of random and somewhat esoteric questions for you.

First, have you ever heard of an entropy mage? It seems like something that might fall in the universal family, if you’ve got space and time manipulation and such in there. Being able to mess with the rate at which individual things and complex systems degraded or lost energy would seem to fit.

Second, I think you mentioned some time ago that one of the more specialized fields was a radiation mage- and pure curiosity leads me to inquire if you’ve ever met one, or heard anyone talk about their capabilities? Seems like they could run a gamut anywhere from “microwave popcorn sans the microwave” to “oops was that a fission reaction?”

I’ve heard of entropy mages, but I haven’t met one. They’re pretty rare. They’ve got some overlap with chance magic, so Alex suggested that if I do find one, I should try and get some lessons from him. I’ve heard of a couple of independent ones who work out of America, but they’re not supposed to be all that sociable.

And yes, I’ve met radiation mages. They’re actually pretty common, or more common than some, anyway. They’re one of those hybrid types that’s kind of universal and kind of elemental, depending where they fall on the scale. The one I met was more on the elemental side, and he didn’t go so much for ‘microwave popcorn’ as for ‘laser beams’. Pain in the neck to dodge, let me tell you. They’re also really good for lighting places up, and they can do the usual see-in-the-dark tricks.

From: BigBlade

Hey i was wondering did you guys ever find out where the ruby key cube came from cause if you guys never found it your lives wouldn’t a series of crisis’s and battles. I’d almost think someone knew it would cause this like a domino effect

another question has there been any new investigations into the fateweaver tomb

For the first one, that’s one of the loose threads we’ve never tied up. After the dust had settled Alex went back and questioned the guy who’d had it before me, but he didn’t get a good answer. Alex suspects it was a plant, but he was never able to prove it. Like you said, it did cause a domino effect, but I don’t know why anyone would have done that.

And official investigations . . . not really. Word spread pretty fast about that thing, and once they learned about Abithriax none of the Light or Dark factions wanted to touch it. There were a couple of adepts a year or two back who decided it would be a good idea to break in, but they were dumb enough to try and do it by extorting an entry method out of Cinder and Deleo. Never did find out what happened to them, but it’s not hard to guess.