and so are percy jackson and dick grayson

a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time

omelas adapts. once you’re out of the hole, it’s still a damn fine place to live. it’s still got universal basic income and great schools and an unparalleled social support net and a life expectancy of 104. if you introduced yourself as the kid from the hole no doubt you could ask for anything and everything you wanted and people would give it to you. you still have to leave. maybe other cities have more cholera and more little girls chopped up in suitcases, but at least you can look at them without feeling somehow responsible.

now and then you wind up at an inn. someone asks where you’re from, and you tell them. they suck their teeth and shake their heads and give you a look and say “omelas, huh? I heard it was powered by a forsaken child” and they all agree that they should have known, of course it was, they’re not surprised by this in the least.

and

“Anakin was taught right from wrong from a young age, first by his mother and then by Kenobi, but any time he was presented with a choice, actively CHOSE WRONG EVERY SINGLE TIME”

So he creates a ritual by which mortals desperate to stave off death can summon him….and he’ll reveal the time and manner of their intended death, and make them a bargain. If they can ‘pay their death forward’ by taking out someone who’s on Thanatos’ list for having evaded or stalled their intended death via Science or Magic, before their own intended death date…..he’ll ‘cancel’ their fated death and let them live past their original expiration date.

Of course, the god of death is a dick, and so when his assassins successfully fulfill their ‘missions’ only to find their own mortality clock gets reset with a NEW fated death a little bit later down the line….Thanatos reasonably points out that it would hardly make sense for him to seek the deaths of those who weasel out of their fates only to then give someone else a free pass. He’s trying to keep the mortality rates HIGH, like, what’s not clicking here?

They can always make a NEW bargain though, Thanatos points out. Same deal as last time, just pass their NEW death on to someone else before their time runs out, and they can reset the clock again, and again, as many times as they want, so long as they keep meeting their kill quotas.

And thus Thanatos gets a whole lot of murders out of every single assassin to sign up for his ‘deal.’

Hypnos, to his brother: Did you just…..build a franchise of Payday Advance loan schemes….for mortality?

Dolos runs what basically amounts to Witness Protection for mortals who piss off the gods…..gods can track mortals via their souls or their thoughts, so Dolos uses the waters of Lethe to wipe the minds of people who seek his help for a fresh start without fear of divine punishment, and then works with Hestia and her order of mages (something to do with heart-fires, they can use their own souls as a kind of magical furnace, but they have to be very careful about how much they use or in what ways, as this is a finite fuel source)….anyway, point is, Dolos and his people use Lethe water to erase any identifying clues from the minds of mortals they relocate, and then Hestia and her people tweak the heart-fires of the to-be-relocated mortals in order to be unrecognizable to any divine hunters looking to track a particular soul across the cosmos.

And then finally Dolos uses his ‘in’ with the Fates to take threads from their discard pile, basically threads that never got used or woven into the Tapestry of Destiny because the gods messed with shit. The Fates don’t like when even gods meddle with their grand design, and have a lot of extra threads that never ended up becoming the lives or destinies they had in mind for those people, as well as a grudge against gods in general, so they’re fine with Dolos dipping into their discard pile as needed in order to pick threads he can ‘graft’ onto the relocated mortals as a fake backstory for them that alters the way others perceive them. Like the fake thread/backstory gets ‘papered over’ on top of that person’s original backstory or history, so now people looking at them get their perceptions or memories of that person jumped from the original thread to the new one. 

Bit of a worldbuilding extra for my fic By Lost Ways….nothing you need to know to understand the fic and its all information that unfolds over the first ten chapters anyway, so no real plot spoilers here. But I do love me some worldbuilding and I know other people do too, so figured some people might like to have it laid out here.

So this is the official Regents’ Deck talked about in that fic, with the exception of the Joker card of course. I’ve filled in the official Regent titles that have been revealed thus far in the prologue, but the other bit is the part that doesn’t really come up in active discussion until certain characters like Bruce and Roy enter the picture with a more scientific approach to things.

Because while the Regents embody and represent symbolic and metaphysical forces through their magic…..they also all each represent and embody a physical force as well. And this is where the magic system of this world really comes in: the use of feathers (the link to the divine energy of Mother Sky in this world, other than the Regents themselves) to channel and manipulate various physical forces.

Of course, there’s a bit more to it than just waving a bunch of feathers around, but the feathers are always a necessary ingredient, and the core key to unlocking various powers or spells. Swan feathers create anti-gravity effects while ostrich feathers ground things, tanager feathers amplify heat while tern feathers drain it away, etc. 

Which is why a particularly ingenious archer, like say, Roy Harper, can be a total bad-ass in this world, even moreso than usual. After all, Roy was known for being the one who created most of his own weapons and trick arrows in the main DC Earth, and when you apply that ingenuity to a feather-based magic system via say, the fletchings on arrows……you get a whole lot of fun stuff, like lightning arrows and frost arrows that act like liquid nitrogen, silencer arrows and arrows that break apart the bonds holding things together.

BUT.

The real trick, for those who have devoted significant parts of their lives to unlocking the secrets of their world’s magic, like Roy…..comes from when you figure out how to COMBINE certain types of feathers….and the physical forces they represent….to get combo effects. 

And that’s how you end up with an archer like Roy who has arrows that have a strange combination of feathers that don’t make sense to most other people at first glance…..but let him do things like fire arrows around corners, and arrows that pass through walls intangibly until they reach their target, or seemingly wipe something entirely out of existence.

So yeah. I had a lot of fun writing Roy in this, lol, due to this particular magic system.

And of course, the Regents are the exceptions to this, as they don’t use feathers to channel their abilities…..as they are in essence walking nuclear reactors tapped directly into the forces they represent, for as long as they’re Regent. Thus using the various magics associated with their Regency is as simple as thinking for them - BUT the flip side is that they can’t use or tap into the power of any other Regencies, even via feathers.

(There are a couple other exceptions to this magic system too, in the sense of characters who use magic that’s completely outside the system….but that’s because the planet Sky is not the only world created in this cosmos, and certain visitors from other worlds still show up, with powers/magic stemming from the worlds of their birth. For instance, Kory’s powers here are fueled by what she calls soulfire, and are tied to the goddess figure of her homeworld, and Atlanteans live beneath the sea in a giant caldera in one of the uppermost mountain ranges in the world….but originally came from another world, a water world, and thus Garth uses a totally different magic system as well.)

But anyway, this is the Regents’ Deck and the physical forces each card corresponds to, just if anyone wants to refer back to it when reading the fic…….although, just FYI, a key part of the story involves the fact that the modern day characters in the fic have some incorrect ideas about the Deck and the Regents. For instance, below is the order the Deck is usually ordered in when not shuffled for a reading…..people think this is the order the Regents are supposed to go in, to make sense with the scientific discoveries they’ve made over the centuries, and how they correspond to the various Regents.

There’s just a couple problems with this order…..as in things that break the mold/don’t make sense according to the in-universe understanding of it.

The big one is the Mockingbird…..the Mockingbird Regent pretty clearly breaks the pattern and always has, as far as anyone knows. It doesn’t seem to fit anywhere…its placed where it is, just because that’s kinda what people have decided is their best guess for it, based on the powers it bestows and unlocks via mockingbird feathers…..but the thing is, as is stated outright in her title and description itself…..the Mockingbird Regent is never as she seems….and never has been. People have had a totally incorrect understanding of her and the forces she embodies pretty much since day one….but whether or not that’s by design, and if so, by whose…..*no spoilers* 

(I will say though that the Mockingbird Regent is Stephanie Brown, and that’s not really a spoiler, so much as a reassurance that I haven’t forgotten about her - or Duke - just because I don’t have them listed as Robins in the summary).

There’s also some minor confusion/incorrect assumptions about the Raven and Ibis Regents and their roles and what they represent/embody, but that’s not hugely crucial to the story.

The other big thing though, is that a couple of characters like Roy and Bruce, have figured out through their various experiments with magic and their scientific studies of it…..there’s something else about the Deck that doesn’t make sense. Two of the cards, in their expert opinions….are missing their true opposite numbers. Something that can only be explained in their minds by the notion that there might be two cards - and thus two whole Regents - that are missing from the Deck. 

How that could possibly happen and what it means IS going to be important to the story however…and it suggests that there’s a couple more types of feathers out there with their own unique magical properties just waiting to be discovered. Or rediscovered as the case may be.

(They’re actually not quite right. There are actually THREE Regents and their corresponding cards that are missing from the Deck. I mention this only because I’m actually reeeeeally interested in seeing if anyone can figure out from this what they are - as in, what forces they’re meant to represent/which cards are missing their true opposites. I know the world so well in my own head that I just honestly have no idea how obvious or not it is, so I’m genuinely curious. I think one should be fairly obvious, but the other two, maybe not).

Anyway, so here’s the Regents’ Deck, as its currently understood in-universe, with the above-mentioned ‘mistakes’.

Sparrow - Space (reduction) Seagull - Space (propagation)   Hummingbird - Time (reduction) Crane - Time (propagation)

Magpie - Quantity (reduction) Kingfisher - Quantity (propagation) Robin - Regent of Change and New Beginnings - Entropy (reduction) Vulture - Entropy (propagation)

Eagle - Weak Nuclear Force (reduction) Shrike - Regent of Bindings & Battle - Strong Nuclear Force (propagation) Swan - Gravity (reduction) Ostrich - Gravity (propagation)

Hawk - Electromagnetism (reduction) Dove - Electromagnetism (propagation) Tern - Regent of Winter and Woes - Thermodynamics (reduction) Tanager - Thermodynamics (propagation)

Cardinal - Light (propagation) Mockingbird - Regent of Lies and Tall Tales Owl - Regent of Secrets and Silence - Sound (reduction) Canary - Regent of Speech and Song - Sound (propagation)