Wizardly Quick-Reference
THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. WILL BE SUBJECT TO MUCH EDITING AND ADDITION yes. Canonmates--or heck, anyone canon-familiar with YW or FW at all--feel free to add/suggest stuff in the comments that you feel might come up in play.
The Speech: The Speech is a universal language that is, on some level, understood by everything from living organisms to rocks to stars to atoms. In YWverse cosmology, all languages of any sort are considered to be descended from the Speech; and all matter, whether organic or otherwise, may be said to have some form of consciousness, whether it be rudimentary awareness or active cognition. Consequentially, individuals who have active mastery of the speech are able to understand anything that speaks or thinks, and therefore anything at all--theoretically (in application, this isn't always true, but exceptions are very rare, to the point that there have only been two cases of it in canon thus far). The Speech is the foundation of all wizardry; things like spell circles, kernel usage, and hyperstring manipulation are only possible through the understanding of the speech.
String/Hyperstring manipulation: In theoretical physics, strings are one-dimensional objects vibrating through hyperspace. For the purposes of DDverse wizardry, they can be thought of kind of like invisible lines of force threaded through all space-time. Most Earth-based species are unable to perceive strings and hyperstrings; cats are an exception to this, as are Ith's people (though strictly speaking, Ith and his folks don't live on this plane of existence). For this reason, the feline and saurian idioms of wizardry are more heavily based upon hyperstring manipulation than those of, say, humans or whales. Physical forces, such as friction, surface tension, and so on, can be detected in hyperstring structure, as can wizardry (whether feline, saurian, or otherwise); there are also "weft lines" and "matter substrates", whose nature and purpose are not elaborated upon in canon, but can be inferred from their names.
Kernels: wizardly constructs governing the physical operation of a local space, where "local" can be anything from a single organism to a city to a planet to a whole continuum, or even sets of continua. The name is most likely a metaphor on kernels in computers. The ability to manipulate these effectively and safely takes a good deal of rigorous training; perhaps reason, they are most often hidden in some way. Of the wizards in camp, only Nita is known to have received training on finding and manipulating kernels.
Master Words: words that give a wizard temporary mastery of a substance or a class of living things. Most of these seem to have multiple levels of implementation. For an example: the master word for a species of organisms can simply cause any members of that species within range to pay attention to the words of its speaker, or it may summon or banish them to a specific location, or it may do more than that (say, temporarily freezing their nervous system). The higher the level of implementation, the more costly it is to the wizard involved. Since this is clearly godmode, we will not be using Master Words on other characters unless given specific, express permission by the players.
Walking on air: usually, an implementation of the Mason's word, the master word for stone--it causes air to temporarily solidify enough that it can be stood or walked upon. Nita et al. have been seen to use this on occasion, and the feline wizards and Ith seem to be quite fond of it.
Walking on water: Seems to usually involve some kind of manipulation of surface tension. Included because it's bloody awesome, and wizards can do it.
Intangibility/Waking Through Stuff: Wizards can manipulate inter-atomic forces so that they can pass through objects that would normally be solid. This technique seems to be implemented more casually by the feline and saurian wizards than by the human ones in canon--in fact, even non-wizardly cats can sometimes do it on instinct, while it has to be done by active spelling for humans--but the human wizards seem to have been experimenting with it to some degree in camp as well. For human wizards, this effect seems to be achieved often--but not always--through the implementation of the Mason's Word.
Invisibility (general): Pretty much what it sounds like. Some implementations involve tricking individual observers rather than the actual manipulation of visible light.
• Sidling: a technique by which a wizard, mostly of the feline or saurian persuasion, goes "sideways"* into a part of reality where visible light doesn't affect matter in the same way. Like passing through solid objects, this occurs more by instinct than by active spelling for cats and saurians. Sidling has several effects: firstly, that the wizard in question becomes invisible to all others except cats and saurians; secondly, that hyperstrings become more clearly visible to the wizard; and thirdly, that everything looks brighter, to the point that it might even be painful to sidle in broad daylight. Human wizards are also capable of sidling, but it's made clear in book six that it isn't necessarily the most efficient option for human wizards.
*"Sideways" can also refer to moving out of a particular universe entirely and into a parallel one; this particular implementation seems to be similar, but not as drastic.
Shield spells: involves creating a field of force around a wizard (or designated object/location). These can be incorporated into the structure of other spells when conditions dictate that this is necessary.
• Defensive shields: Shields that disallow the passage of whatever forces or particles are specified. The quantity of force that a shield is capable of stopping also depends on the particular implementation, which may be, variously, strong enough to block a thrown punch, an atomic weapon, or a supernova at astronomically point-blank range (all of these have seen use in canon).
• Life support: Shields can also be used to contain "life support" effects--for an example, a shield can be made to contain air and heat for a wizard working in a vacuum.
Teleportation: generally, wizards in camp will do this one of two ways:
• Beam-me-up-Scotty: Kit's (geeky, catching) nickname for the form of instantaneous transport used most often by most of the wizards in camp. Used for short-distance jumps (in this case, "short-distance" generally being anything within the range of "from here to the moon", though all of the YW wizards have at some point used them incrementally to travel halfway across the known universe, or even further).
• Worldgating: technically, this term can refer to any kind of teleportation in YWverse; however, more specifically, it's used to refer to the sort that involves a pre-established gating facility. Because they involve a weakness in the structure of space-time, such facilities are more practical for jumps requiring more power, such as those involving distances further than the moon, or those that have a temporal aspect as well as a spatial one. This wouldn't be relevant here, since there aren't any real free-standing gates of the usual variety accessible to the wizards in camp, nor, indeed, places to travel to that are distant enough to require the use of one, but Ith seems to be his own personal roving worldgate. In camp, this amounts to "Ith's teleports look nothing like the other wizards'".
Healing Spells: in general, spells that involve the knitting together of someone's cells require some amount of blood. A cursory healing only calls for blood of some kind; more targeted and in-depth healing requires the wizard's own blood. The more extensive the healing, the more blood is required.
• Chemistry: healing that only involves some kind of chemical alteration--e.g. hormonal adjustment or detoxification--does not seem to require blood. As far as I can recall, we've only ever seen this twice in canon, both from feline wizards operating on human subjects, and in both cases the humans in question were somehow important to the wizards' current mission.
TBA: Prescience/the Eye/timestream punch; Powers; Ordeals; the Oath...?
Cut links: The Speech; Strings/Hyperstrings; Kernels; Master Words; Walking on Air/Water; Walking through Solids; Invisibility; Shields; Teleportation; Healing.
The Speech: The Speech is a universal language that is, on some level, understood by everything from living organisms to rocks to stars to atoms. In YWverse cosmology, all languages of any sort are considered to be descended from the Speech; and all matter, whether organic or otherwise, may be said to have some form of consciousness, whether it be rudimentary awareness or active cognition. Consequentially, individuals who have active mastery of the speech are able to understand anything that speaks or thinks, and therefore anything at all--theoretically (in application, this isn't always true, but exceptions are very rare, to the point that there have only been two cases of it in canon thus far). The Speech is the foundation of all wizardry; things like spell circles, kernel usage, and hyperstring manipulation are only possible through the understanding of the speech.
String/Hyperstring manipulation: In theoretical physics, strings are one-dimensional objects vibrating through hyperspace. For the purposes of DDverse wizardry, they can be thought of kind of like invisible lines of force threaded through all space-time. Most Earth-based species are unable to perceive strings and hyperstrings; cats are an exception to this, as are Ith's people (though strictly speaking, Ith and his folks don't live on this plane of existence). For this reason, the feline and saurian idioms of wizardry are more heavily based upon hyperstring manipulation than those of, say, humans or whales. Physical forces, such as friction, surface tension, and so on, can be detected in hyperstring structure, as can wizardry (whether feline, saurian, or otherwise); there are also "weft lines" and "matter substrates", whose nature and purpose are not elaborated upon in canon, but can be inferred from their names.
Kernels: wizardly constructs governing the physical operation of a local space, where "local" can be anything from a single organism to a city to a planet to a whole continuum, or even sets of continua. The name is most likely a metaphor on kernels in computers. The ability to manipulate these effectively and safely takes a good deal of rigorous training; perhaps reason, they are most often hidden in some way. Of the wizards in camp, only Nita is known to have received training on finding and manipulating kernels.
Master Words: words that give a wizard temporary mastery of a substance or a class of living things. Most of these seem to have multiple levels of implementation. For an example: the master word for a species of organisms can simply cause any members of that species within range to pay attention to the words of its speaker, or it may summon or banish them to a specific location, or it may do more than that (say, temporarily freezing their nervous system). The higher the level of implementation, the more costly it is to the wizard involved. Since this is clearly godmode, we will not be using Master Words on other characters unless given specific, express permission by the players.
Walking on air: usually, an implementation of the Mason's word, the master word for stone--it causes air to temporarily solidify enough that it can be stood or walked upon. Nita et al. have been seen to use this on occasion, and the feline wizards and Ith seem to be quite fond of it.
Walking on water: Seems to usually involve some kind of manipulation of surface tension. Included because it's bloody awesome, and wizards can do it.
Intangibility/Waking Through Stuff: Wizards can manipulate inter-atomic forces so that they can pass through objects that would normally be solid. This technique seems to be implemented more casually by the feline and saurian wizards than by the human ones in canon--in fact, even non-wizardly cats can sometimes do it on instinct, while it has to be done by active spelling for humans--but the human wizards seem to have been experimenting with it to some degree in camp as well. For human wizards, this effect seems to be achieved often--but not always--through the implementation of the Mason's Word.
Invisibility (general): Pretty much what it sounds like. Some implementations involve tricking individual observers rather than the actual manipulation of visible light.
• Sidling: a technique by which a wizard, mostly of the feline or saurian persuasion, goes "sideways"* into a part of reality where visible light doesn't affect matter in the same way. Like passing through solid objects, this occurs more by instinct than by active spelling for cats and saurians. Sidling has several effects: firstly, that the wizard in question becomes invisible to all others except cats and saurians; secondly, that hyperstrings become more clearly visible to the wizard; and thirdly, that everything looks brighter, to the point that it might even be painful to sidle in broad daylight. Human wizards are also capable of sidling, but it's made clear in book six that it isn't necessarily the most efficient option for human wizards.
*"Sideways" can also refer to moving out of a particular universe entirely and into a parallel one; this particular implementation seems to be similar, but not as drastic.
Shield spells: involves creating a field of force around a wizard (or designated object/location). These can be incorporated into the structure of other spells when conditions dictate that this is necessary.
• Defensive shields: Shields that disallow the passage of whatever forces or particles are specified. The quantity of force that a shield is capable of stopping also depends on the particular implementation, which may be, variously, strong enough to block a thrown punch, an atomic weapon, or a supernova at astronomically point-blank range (all of these have seen use in canon).
• Life support: Shields can also be used to contain "life support" effects--for an example, a shield can be made to contain air and heat for a wizard working in a vacuum.
Teleportation: generally, wizards in camp will do this one of two ways:
• Beam-me-up-Scotty: Kit's (geeky, catching) nickname for the form of instantaneous transport used most often by most of the wizards in camp. Used for short-distance jumps (in this case, "short-distance" generally being anything within the range of "from here to the moon", though all of the YW wizards have at some point used them incrementally to travel halfway across the known universe, or even further).
• Worldgating: technically, this term can refer to any kind of teleportation in YWverse; however, more specifically, it's used to refer to the sort that involves a pre-established gating facility. Because they involve a weakness in the structure of space-time, such facilities are more practical for jumps requiring more power, such as those involving distances further than the moon, or those that have a temporal aspect as well as a spatial one. This wouldn't be relevant here, since there aren't any real free-standing gates of the usual variety accessible to the wizards in camp, nor, indeed, places to travel to that are distant enough to require the use of one, but Ith seems to be his own personal roving worldgate. In camp, this amounts to "Ith's teleports look nothing like the other wizards'".
Healing Spells: in general, spells that involve the knitting together of someone's cells require some amount of blood. A cursory healing only calls for blood of some kind; more targeted and in-depth healing requires the wizard's own blood. The more extensive the healing, the more blood is required.
• Chemistry: healing that only involves some kind of chemical alteration--e.g. hormonal adjustment or detoxification--does not seem to require blood. As far as I can recall, we've only ever seen this twice in canon, both from feline wizards operating on human subjects, and in both cases the humans in question were somehow important to the wizards' current mission.
TBA: Prescience/the Eye/timestream punch; Powers; Ordeals; the Oath...?
Cut links: The Speech; Strings/Hyperstrings; Kernels; Master Words; Walking on Air/Water; Walking through Solids; Invisibility; Shields; Teleportation; Healing.