Revolution (RWBY Planeswalker Blake)

[w34v3r]

I meant on the plane we are on, from the descriptions we got from the wizard fans.

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I guess that's my question then, is warlock a term for entropy mages or something here? Because if it turns out it means 'mage from excessively dark guild' then we're going to feel really dumb if we act like it means 'black mana enthusiast'.

Given the origin of the word it may even mean 'mage who turned on their guild in a spectacularly assholish way'.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

Yeah... And Fairy Tale is a setting where being a Demon doesn't necessarily make you evil. Aside from the Etherious and Tartaros Demons (which are manufactured to be evil and are basically Dark Guild Wizards; and even then can have heel-face turns), there are known canonical instances of Demons that are no different morally speaking than the average joe.

And further, being a Demon has absolutely bupkiss to do with being Black. You're making an assumption that is well in excess of the available evidence, and honestly it's not even a helpful one; it boils down to "rather than do anything to figure out why this voice keeps talking to us or what it is, we should assume it's an evil demon and just let it keep whispering in our head forever."

I mean... what's the alternative, here?

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'Some demons aren't evil' ≠ 'all demons aren't evil'. We know there's an entire army of hostile demons attacking the kingdom, in fact. So, can we just assume that these possible demons are friendly?

No. Obviously that would be unsafe.

The rational course of action is to act with caution. That means gathering information to determine what we are actually dealing with, and not doing anything that could endanger ourselves in the meanwhile. We should not engage with the entities themselves until we know what they are, and we should find out what they are ASAP.

 

[Valmond]

I guess that's my question then, is warlock a term for entropy mages or something here? Because if it turns out it means 'mage from excessively dark guild' then we're going to feel really dumb if we act like it means 'black mana enthusiast'.

Given the origin of the word it may even mean 'mage who turned on their guild in a spectacularly assholish way'.

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Warlocks have been legalized, and dark guilds have not.
So i'm assuming (asses and all), that they are different.
Especially given the point of the mage in angel's guild who is not from a dark guild, but was described as a warlock using (kinda, sorta, maybe) death magic.

 

[Sotek]

I do feel like Angel's Eye is the guild our author likes the most, which means I'm probably going to vote in favor of it.

But I think we should look into Sylph at least a bit, especially if they don't require exclusivity in ways we care about.

On the voices: We need to learn more about them, but maaaybe we should not tell random non-black-magic-users about them on the literal first conversation. At least wait till we have guildmates to talk to?

I guess that's my question then, is warlock a term for entropy mages or something here? Because if it turns out it means 'mage from excessively dark guild' then we're going to feel really dumb if we act like it means 'black mana enthusiast'.

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From context it looks like it involves magic of death and undeath. Note that Angel's Eye was NOT called a dark guild but has a warlock, so it's definitely not "mage from excessively dark guild".

 

[Valmond]

'Some demons aren't evil' does not mean that 'all demons aren't evil'. We know there's an entire army of hostile demons attacking the kingdom, in fact. So, can we just assume that these possible demons are friendly?

No. Obviously not.

The rational course of action is to act with caution. That means gathering information to determine what we are actually dealing with, and not doing anything that could endanger ourselves in the meanwhile. We should not engage with the entities themselves until we know what they are, and we should find out what they are ASAP.

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AKA, not telling strangers you have voices in your head asking you to pray, and if other people are prey.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

AKA, not telling strangers you have voices in your head asking you to pray, and if other people are prey.

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No, that is the exact opposite of the conclusion I just discussed. We need outside information. We can debate what a good source of that information is, but we're going to need to find and consult someone knowledgeable about this.

The only alternative to an outside source of information would be the entities themselves, and we cannot trust anything they might tell us.

And just ignoring the situation doesn't seem like a good idea either.

 

[NemoMarx]

I don't see how telling people about the voices is any less risk than replying to the voices or getting more information that way. Yeah, the information from the voices is probably gonna be misleading - but they already know about us, and we can avoid giving up more information ourselves that way. Whereas telling wizards about it is giving them info about us (hears possibly demonic voices) and isn't guaranteed to be any more objective about it.

We don't even really know if the voices are from this plane or not, yet.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

I don't see how telling people about the voices is any less risk than replying to the voices or getting more information that way. Yeah, the information from the voices is probably gonna be misleading - but they already know about us, and we can avoid giving up more information ourselves that way. Whereas telling wizards about it is giving them info about us (hears possibly demonic voices) and isn't guaranteed to be any more objective about it.

We don't even really know if the voices are from this plane or not, yet.

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The entities may very well have a motivation to lie. A respected outside expert is much less likely to have the same issue. That is why we need to find such an outside expert to consult to find out what we are dealing with.

Wizards in the sanctioned guilds are broadly helpful in this world, particularly when approached with a job request. It's a reasonable course of action. Keeping this to ourselves and trying to deal with it without any outside information or help would be profoundly dangerous, with risks we can't even gauge because we don't know what's going on.

 

[Logos01]

'Some demons aren't evil' does not mean that 'all demons aren't evil'. We know there's an entire army of hostile demons attacking the kingdom, in fact. So, can we just assume that these possible demons are friendly?

No. Obviously not.

The rational course of action is to act with caution. That means gathering information to determine what we are actually dealing with, and not doing anything that could endanger ourselves in the meanwhile. We should not engage with the entities themselves until we know what they are, and we should find out what they are ASAP.

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To my knowledge the only way Blake has to get that knowledge is to talk to it. Because demons in this setting don't have the ability to whisper in your dreams from arbitrary distances, nor do they ask you for your prayers, nor are they magically aligned Black.

Those demons attacking the kingdom are more akin to Xianxia Demon Beasts. Dark Guild wizards with a flavor of magic that comes with body transformation. None of which is Black.

So again, what's the alternative here? At some point she's just going to have to bite the bullet in talking to it and neither the Fairy Tale setting nor the RWBY setting has any cultural context that supports the idea of "demonic possession" of the sort you're thinking of here. There's no Great Satan with ghostly evil spirits from another dimension that want to swallow your soul or degrade you with profane blood contracts.

So since Blake certainly isn't willing to go around asking random people "hey, how do y'all deal with it when you start hearing voices in your head and they won't go away?" ... again, I'd really like to see an alternative other than just talking to it.

And as to this somehow being "a risk" ... what risk would that even be, exactly? It's a boring conversationalist? It can already talk to her whenever it wants to.

 

[Valmond]

No, that is the exact opposite of the conclusion I just discussed. We need outside information. We can debate what a good source of that information is, but we're going to need to find and consult someone knowledgeable about this.

The only alternative to an outside source of information would be the entities themselves, and we cannot trust anything they might tell us.

And just ignoring the situation doesn't seem like a good idea either.

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Books, books are great.
Also learning about magic in general, and warlocks
Asking strangers about something people might want to kill us over is a stupid idea.
Again, note the word "strangers", in my quote.
And as Nemomarx noted, at this point asking the voices themselves is as valid (probably more so) a source of information than anything else available to us.
We literally know nothing about them, except that they are being friendly and seemingly offering help.

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The entities may very well have a motivation to lie. A respected outside expert is much less likely to have the same issue. That is why we need to find such an outside expert to consult to find out what we are dealing with.

Wizards in the sanctioned guilds are broadly helpful in this world, particularly when approached with a job request. It's a reasonable course of action. Keeping this to ourselves and trying to deal with it without any outside information or help would be profoundly dangerous, with risks we can't even gauge because we don't know what's going on.

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And respected outside expert might know nothing about the voices, and could be actively misinformed, because we have no little to no info to offer them, and the voices may quite possibly be from another plane of existence entirely so they have zero info on them and may try to fit the evidence into wrong framework.

We need more information, and while i may be partially joking in my desire to talk to the voices, seriosuly speaking we do need to talk to them to be certain we are actually learning about them, instead of just acting on blind prejudice.

 

[Logos01]

We literally know nothing about them, except that they are being friendly and seemingly offering help.

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Legit. "Who are you, what do you want, and why won't you leave me alone?" That's your opener right there.

Even if it lies, the mere fact that there are things it wants Blake to believe about it is informative.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

So again, what's the alternative here? At some point she's just going to have to bite the bullet in talking to it and neither the Fairy Tale setting nor the RWBY setting has any cultural context that supports the idea of "demonic possession" of the sort you're thinking of here. There's no Great Satan with ghostly evil spirits from another dimension that want to swallow your soul or degrade you with profane blood contracts.

So since Blake certainly isn't willing to go around asking random people "hey, how do y'all deal with it when you start hearing voices in your head and they won't go away?" ... again, I'd really like to see an alternative other than just talking to it.

And as to this somehow being "a risk" ... what risk would that even be, exactly? It's a boring conversationalist? It can already talk to her whenever it wants to.

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Again, the reasonable alternative here that you keep asking for is to seek out and consult an expert, who we can probably get reliable information from. More trustworthy than from the entities themselves.

As for what the risks of talking to the entities are, what if they can corrupt a host that opens up to them? What if they can possess Blake? What if they can make her sick, or alter her mind, or steal her mana? What if they can manifest in reality and start doing horrible things?

We don't know what the hell we're dealing with. When you find a suspicious package you don't open it yourself to see what happens, you call a bomb squad.

And respected outside expert might know nothing about the voices, and could be actively misinformed, because we have no little to no info to offer them, and the voices may quite possibly be from another plane of existence entirely so they have zero info on them and may try to fit the evidence into wrong framework.

We need more information, and while i may be partially joking in my desire to talk to the voices, seriosuly speaking we do need to talk to them to be certain we are actually learning about them, instead of just acting on blind prejudice.

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You want to not bother consulting an expert because of the possibility that they won't know anything?

Have you...considered the possibility that they might?

I'm glad we agree on the necessity of getting information. We just need to agree on the safest, most trustworthy source.

 

[Alivaril]

@Alivaril -- I can't get this thought out of my head now. Is there a possibility that Blake could use Drain Life as part of her Aura training routine? Work out how to store the energy in her Aura or draw from it, increase her total Aura without the Dark Vigor drawbacks, use her Aura as a "battery" for Mana magic, etc? It's just that the energies seem very similar.

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For the record, you don't need to @ me for stuff like this; I'll just answer with "you don't know." Exploring these sorts of questions IC is what bleedover (IE Blake sometimes being affected by ideas and similar stuff in thread) is for.

I do feel like Angel's Eye is the guild our author likes the most, which means I'm probably going to vote in favor of it.

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While I appreciate the thought, it's important to remember that I am not my characters (which is good, because some of them are utter monsters). An enthusiast favoring a Guild =/= me particularly favoring it. Any meddling from me these days would be more for the sake of "would I hate writing this? If so, then I shouldn't have it as an option." (EDIT: For anyone wondering: I haven't actually meddled to date for anything. It's just a guideline I realized might be helpful.)

 

[cheesyme]

As for what the risks of talking to the entities are, what if they can corrupt a host that opens up to them? What if they can possess Blake? What if they can make her sick, or alter her mind, or steal her mana? What if they can manifest in reality and start doing horrible things?

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Worth noting, most of those things are primarily Blue, not Black, nor are they things reasonable for Blake to assume.

 

[Valmond]

You want to not bother consulting an expert because of the possibility that they won't know anything?

Have you...considered the possibility that they might?

I don't understand your reasoning here at all. It feels like you've already decided you don't want to consult an expert, so you're dismissing the option without thinking about it.

I'm glad we agree on the necessity of getting information. We just need to agree on the safest, most trustworthy source.

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I have considered the possibility that an expert bound to a single plane might have relevant information about the voices heard by our not single plane bound mage.
It is possible.
And we have no way to actually verify it in anyway beforehand.
And, again, do not give people excuse to kill you.
We need to find someone who to talk to about this that we trust at some level, if not as friend or ally, then as someone with a history of being reasonable in the face of possible demonically possessed warlocks.

We need to learn, about the voices, our magic, and this plane, before we can judge if a supposed expert is actually an expert.
I want to talk to the voices, because even if we might not want to trust them 100% (and do we really want to trust some unknown expert 100%, especially when it is quite possible they are working on an OCP?), talking to them is the most direct way to gain information about them.

 

[Logos01]

As for what the risks of talking to the entities are, what if they can corrupt a host that opens up to them? What if they can possess Blake? What if they can make her sick, or alter her mind, or steal her mana? What if they can manifest in reality and start doing horrible things?

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Blake, again, has no reason to even suspect such a thing as "opening the door to possession" is a thing.

To my knowledge such things don't even exist in Fairy Tale anyhow, and even if it did it certainly wouldn't be restricted to demons.

The thing you're not getting here, furthermore, is that it can already talk to her whenever it wants to. That means that it can already intrude upon her mind at will, without any invitation. Which in turn means that if mental domination is in that skillset it could likely already do so. We've already seen that things like Charm spells can bypass what little defenses Blake has, and a "disembodied voice in your head that asks you to pray to it" is almost certainly better with mental magic than random slob drunk Wizard.

"What if they can manifest in reality and start doing horrible things?" -- Well, what if they can? What if what sets them off in doing so is not talking to them?

You've got this very strong idea of what this being is, and your entire justification for it is that it's intruding in her thoughts and is Black.

You're assuming that it is therefore evil, Satanic-themed, and requires permission to devour Blake's soul.

You have yet to show any reason for those assumptions to be more valid than the myriad other possibilities, including their own opposition: and furthermore you've yet to show any reason why Blake would think that way about it, since she has zero cultural context for such, and has never been anywhere that does. (Because, again, Demons in Fairy Tale are physical, mortal, beings. People. People who are no more likely than any other magic using person to have mind or soul magics.)

 

[Czlyydwr Llrngwl]

Hm, well, the thread discussion has convinced me to side with the Sylphs. Artifuckery 100%!

Partly just for the chance to use the word "artifuckery" again, mostly because Blake has revolutionary ambitions and enchanted artifacts are something you can hand out for others to use, and if necessary take back if they're being misused, unlike teaching them OCP magic on Remnant or unlocking Auras on Earthland. Further, if/when she eventually arrives in MSLN-land it's apt to mean she has some level of qualifications in the care and feeding of Lost Logia, which would be a valuable skill both in its own right and to get an in with whatever group she might want to join.

edit: Also, IIRC all or nearly all Artifacts in MtG don't require any specific color of mana, making them easier to use than having to manage five different mana supplies.

 

[Valmond]

I want to head to angel guild because of the warlock they already have is a potential juicy source of information if we can make friends.
But i would not be against becomming magitech wizard either.

 

[Skelm]

I don't see any path to understanding the voices without getting the voices to give is their spiel. Yeah, they might lie to us, but hearing which lies they tell is still more information then we currently have. Without even that much, I don't see how anyone else could reasonably know what they are.

From an outside perspective, the most likely explanation is that Blake is just hallucinating.

 

[SmolPasta]

I am against the idea of asking these guys about the voices. They're not wizards, they're not experts, they're random guys who love to talk about magic guilds and we have known for what, five minutes?

Also, even if the voices in our head could control or possess us, well we just had an encounter with a mage trying kind of the same thing. While i do not suggest trying to ask the voices directly (at least not yet) i think it's a good idea to learn more about the forces in play in this world before asking around.

 

[Logos01]

edit: Also, IIRC all or nearly all Artifacts in MtG don't require any specific color of mana, making them easier to use than having to manage five different mana supplies.

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I honestly see that as almost more flavortext and game mechanic than anything. There are many Artifacts which have a clear Color association. Especially the ones that don't actually do anything but generate color mana, or that require a specific color of mana in order to be activated/tapped.

Plus there's the difference between manufacture and summoning, and MtG implies you're just always summoning Artifacts rather than crafting them, as a part of gameplay.

In other words, actually crafting the originals might have a very different process.

But yeah; handing out artifacts to people rather than teaching them Color Mana is an immensely more reversible action, and Blake has already had to be confronted with the fact that someone she deeply trusted wasn't who she thought he was. She'd care about that.

 

[TaliesinSkye]

-snip-

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You're fundamentally misunderstanding my argument. You think I believe that the entities are something terrible. That is not the case.

I am saying that we exist in state of not knowing what the entities are right now. We have no idea what they are, what they are capable of, what they want, what risks are associated with them.

They could be Lovecraftian horrors and talking to them could twist Blake to madness. We. Don't. Know.

When you're faced with something that might be dangerous and has completely unknown risks associated you back away slowly and don't fuck with it. If possible you call someone who might be better able to deal with it.

So, we need to take whatever course of action minimizes the unknown risks while getting information about what they are, quickly. The best route to that is probably finding an expert or another source of information like a specialized library. It would be a tremendous risk to engage with the thing instead.

I don't see any path to understanding the voices without getting the voices to give is their spiel.

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The other path is seeking out an expert, or other source of knowledge. We could go to a big mage guild and offer 'figure out what's going on with my issue' or 'find me an expert in a this topic' as a job, for example. Or we could find a library, I have lower hopes for that approach but it does keep things close to the vest.

 

[ImperatorV]

Sylphs sounds fun. We could pick up some artifice, and then later join Angel Team or Liquid Horizon, since Sylph is fine with ex-members joining non-artificer guilds.

It's good to have a diverse skillset, and choosing Sylph doesn't really restrict our options.

 

[Valmond]

You're fundamentally misunderstanding my argument. You think I believe that the entities are something terrible. That is not the case.

I am saying that we exist in state of not knowing what the entities are right now. We have no idea what they are, what they are capable of, what they want, what risks are associated with them.

They could be Lovecraftian horrors and talking to them could twist Blake to madness. We. Don't. Know.

When you're faced with something that might be dangerous and has completely unknown risks associated you back away slowly and don't fuck with it. If possible you call someone who might be better able to deal with it.

So, we need to take whatever course of action minimizes the unknown risks while getting information about what they are, quickly. The best route to that is probably finding an expert or another source of information like a specialized library. It would be a tremendous risk to engage with the thing instead.


The other path is seeking out an expert, or other source of knowledge. We could go to a big mage guild and offer 'figure out what's going on with my issue' or 'find me an expert in a this topic' as a job, for example. Or we could find a library, I have lower hopes for that approach but it does keep things close to the vest.

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That is kinda true of people as well.
We just had a (possibly?) random asshole try to mindwhammy us.
No, succeed in mindwhammying us, if (probably?) not succeed in their actual goal.
And it is quite possible this plane has zero experts on our issue.

I agree with you that this world has various malicious entities, most of them are indistinguishable from people, because they are people, and just because someone is an invisible voice in our head does not make them one.
from meta gaming standpoint, i think we can trust that talking to the voices is not insta game over, and from in character standpoint, i don't see Blake as trusting enough to open up to random people, even experts, about the friendly neighborhood "spooky voices inside her head".

 

[Alivaril]

During the Guild preference vote, I'll add an X Y/N option for attending at least some of Sylph's classes before joining whatever Guild won the preference vote.

EDIT: Or not-so-binary since I should probably include "after you join a Guild" or "once you sort things out as far as the voices are concerned" as options.