please say you plan to publish twin primes once it’s done bc it sounds so good omg (irrelevant but i never thought I’d see someone else with a Straight male oc who turns to yaoi out of loneliness 😭 THIS is the kind of #problematic male character i like to see)
ALSO! i’d love it if you posted more about how magic works in the twin primes universe, u said it had similarities to annihilation and that sounds very cool
YES HI publishing is definitely the idea! We probably have many years to go until that point but I'd love for that to be the end state of this project– right now I need 15k words of it for my MA, and I'm hoping that after that I can keep the momentum going for a full draft by sometime next year (although I'm not holding myself to that and neither should anyone else).
Love love love finding another 'person of a certain sexuality acting against it for problematic or selfish ends' enjoyer we're a rare but noble breed... I'm definitely going to be making a separate post on Toly & his insanities at some point so stay tuned for that!
As for the magic system– ok so! Essentially, the world of Twin Primes was created in shorthand tribute to the dnd planes of existence, here restricted to just two: the Material Plane (where our characters/people in general reside) and the Immaterial Plane (where magic resides).
Rather than being layered or neighbors or anything of that sort, the two planes are best visualized as being intertwined in a sort of double helix structure, with the Immaterial being 'woven through' the Material. Like if the Material is what we can feel / touch / see, the Immaterial is the threads binding it together behind the scenes. It's the raw energy & potential that complements the physicality of the Material, and allows you to play with the latter's structures– like tugging on one of those strings, or making a new knot, or even unraveling parts of them, and triggering a respective effect in the Material Plane. Reaching behind widely perceived reality and moving the pieces that comprise of it.
In Twin Primes, this is how magic works– first by opening yourself up to access to the Immaterial, then slowly learning how to refine that access so you can actually exercise it.
Now following up on that opening yourself part. Essentially, the Immaterial is a little like a foreign body you have to introduce into your own, and that will remember you (and those who are an extension of you, ie next of kin) accordingly. This means that to practice magic, someone in your family needs to have taken that initial step to open a channel with it.
However, magic is also accumulative, which mostly means two things– a) that a first generation practitioner, despite being indispensable to the process at large, is generally both weaker as an individual practitioner & more dismissed by their peers, and b) the further you get from that first practitioner, and especially if your parents & grandparents & whatever went on to foster active relationships with magic as well, the easier magic will come to you in turn, with less effort going into accessing it (hilariously, here comes the double edged sword, because for a fourth or fifth generation practicioner, the problem usually starts to lie in controlling magic).
I wrote down some stuff about this process/premise in my roughest outline, ft the very specific situation my main character (a first generation practitioner) finds herself in, to help explain it to myself. So to save time I'm just going to attach it below:
So, yes. In tldr, while most first generation practitioners struggle with the adjustment period of exposure to the Immaterial, and will never have the same complete ease of access to it as their latter generation counterparts, they're still meant to be functioning magicians in their own right.
Except for the 1% chance that the process doesn't actually take.
Because opening these channels isn't a one way street. Just as you're pulling from the Immaterial, so too is it pulling back (for what purpose is another post entirely, but I've tried condensing it in the tags)– and there's always the off chance that in making space for it within yourself, it starts accidentally taking up too much. Your system might be incompatible with it, it might start pulling from you harder than you pull from it, it might wind up parasitic rather than symbiotic.
In these cases, and in the case of Naira specifically, the effects on the body/brain become both damaging and degenerative, as you find yourself slowly acclimating to the rhythm of the Immaterial rather than being able to wield it in a Material space– losing your sense of time and space, sleepwalking, hallucinating in all possible senses (or seeing elements of the Immaterial threaded through the everyday as your mental barriers to it erode, haha who knows!), etc. These effects worsen the more you use magic.
Unfortunately the only thing Naira has ever cared about is magic, so the problem only writes itself 👍 autistic or standard academic? You decide
