Mist: Rank 0

Rank 0 Mist

(Difficulty 15)

"The Dissolution of Doubt"

Effects at this rank of Mist unmake what is already unreal—causes a thing that is not to remain not, an illusion to unravel, a lie to demonstrate it false and not part of the is.

To use this rank of Mist you must name an apparent thing that you believe unreal. It need not be formally an illusion or a lie: it suffices that it be a thing which presents itself as existing, or longs towards existing, but is currently inclined towards falsehood and certainly no closer to reality than the would have been.

Success returns the MP or available free action; failure (whether because the thing you targeted was real or because your roll did not suffice) consumes them. If you have targeted a "hesitant" or "legendary form" that sought to become real, then you may opt to roll damage instead of recovering your MP or action; if your target was either illusory or never there at all, then the GM eliminates it from play. In this fashion, much as you may use Praxis to confirm the existence of a thing you believe so, you may use Mist to falsify an idea you believe to be untrue.

The fairy term for this effects is to see the mist; the fairy, wondering if a thing is real, catches sight of the shrouding of mist around it, and knows it is not so. Darkness sprites have a facility and intimacy with the Mist, and receive a +1 on this roll.

Elemental spirits of rank 0 Mist include the reason catchers, the city wells, and some argue the darkness sprites themselves. These are creatures that specialize either in the dissolution and containment of illusion, or the simplification and reduction of the forms of the world.

Character Splat: Sprites (General)

The sprites are the fairies of raw life—the vitality that is in the world that causes things to be rather than be not, to move rather than to slumber in stillness, to dance and burn with life rather than fade away into the great gray doldrums that preceded light and faith and existence.

They are the creatures of action, being, and becoming: of the world as a forum for action, a place of transformative doing that makes one thing into another. They are the power source for magic and the world itself—it is their raw energy that sustains the great sea of experience, the fairy courts, human civilization, and the world and sound. To be a sprite is to share an essence with the Sun that gives life to the world, the numinous entities that caused the world to coalesce from nothing, and the "field of sparks"—the quasi-sentient nodes of energy and power in the underlying metaphysical substrate that fairy theologians hold as the source of existence.

Fairies represents the raw power of magic in a scene—the stuff most commonly provided by the sprites—with tokens. Power tokens are magic that seeks to answer need and bring things into harmony: the more of these tokens a scene contains, the more magic infuses everything with its power and draws things together towards a sublime ending. Spells and effects often require a certain number of power tokens to function: they do not consume these tokens, but rather charge up from them, so that, e.g., a flight spell might require three such tokens in a scene, while transforming a city block into a gleaming citadel of faerie might require eight.

Power tokens come at a certain cost. The magic is always seeking expression, and this search does not always yield to conscious will. When someone first enters a scene containing many power tokens, the magic may ground itself out through them; when a scene containing many such tokens breaks up, it may ground itself out through everyone therein. Sprites are immune to this "flowburn," but anyone else might be injured, transformed, or dazed.

Mist tokens, conversely, are a kind of magic that shrouds the world in myth and mystery. It's magic that questions, magic that leaves questions, magic that challenges the conceptions of the mind while infusing the great background of experience with power. Mist tokens function much like power tokens save that where the Mist draws down details become unreal: the world becomes as a dream or a religious experience. Only the very large things, such as emotions, the sun, the sea, love, glory, friendship, hate, and dreaming can emerge from a Mist-charged scene as real as they were inside it. Characters may be flowburned (strictly speaking, "Mistburned") by Mist tokens as well, but the effect is different: not injury but unreality, not dizziness but a waking dream, and a transformation that is more likely spiritual than physical.

The three kinds of sprite, then, are:

• Darkness sprites, who source the Mist;
• Nicknobs, or worldkin sprites, who shape and refine power; and
• Spark sprites, the purest manifestation of magic, vitality, and life.

Each is immune to flowburn and Mistburn. Each is concerned most prominently with the raw power of magic: spark sprites, who are an endless source of power tokens; darkness sprites, who dwell in Mist; and the worldkin sprites, the nicknobs, who manage the flows of power through the world.

TENTATIVE: one or more elements of this post is particularly open to later change.
[nicknobs.]

Metaphysics: The Would-Have-Been

The Would-Have-Been

And underneath what is, like the deeper currents beneath the ocean's face, is the would have been.

The would have been, too, is made of forms.

They present themselves to the mind: look, here ought have been a cat; here, there could have been a table; here, but for that which intercedes, a person would have died.

The would have been is more personal than the is.

The forms shift; they are ambiguous; they are keyed, in respects, to the mind that watches. They are ghosts and shadows. But they are not unreal. Any fairy can touch upon the would have been, see into it, pull pieces of it closer to the surface or push them farther down.

Something is, beneath the is. Something is, that would have been.

We can say, roughly, that there are two large categories of things that fall into the would have been. The first is myth and story. These are great underdeep currents, powers that shoulder their way in and about the is, things constantly seeking to disturb reality with themselves. These are the things that wish to be and they impinge on the mind as things that we feel, see, believe, but know at the same time they are not true.

These are the closet monsters; these are the triumphs of righteousness; these are the perfect towns that exist somewhere in the country, the perfect lives, the perfect people. These are the killer bees. These are Elvis, still alive, and just a little over at the gas pump next to your own.

And then there are the actions of the fey that fail to be true.

When a fairy seeks to act, and is prevented, then their action falls into the would have been. The fore-echo of their intention still lingers in the world. The thing they would have achieved still hangs about them like an aura in the air. It lives. It is like a snarling cat, retreating with reluctance from the good food of the world.

The marks it leaves as it departs the real become a portion of what is.

Then last there is a spare small scattering of forms that emerge on their own into the would have been. It is always possible, after all, to come upon a person and realize, "They would have been a car!" Or to find an apple tree and say, "This would have been an orange!"

Here, there would have been a building---if the project hadn't failed.

This cup! It would have broken, if the floor hadn't been so soft.

These things are unique in their behavior; they have no characteristic quality; they do not organize themselves into rivers of myth or partake in the actions of the fey. They are simply padding in the would have been---things that came close to happening but did not; things too strong for the might have been.

And the meaning of all of this is simple: that the forms of the world, and the actions of the fey, conduct themselves with a certain mindfulness to the thrumming currents of the would have been below. They are shaped by them, buffeted by them, mindful of them: though they are not the same, what is knows what could have been.

It can be denied truth, but not existence.

It lives and piles up in echoes within the substance of the Mist.