#atlaskind

To them it's the best theory but they lack the absolute certainty I can indulge in as the author.

They discuss it every few years and propose alternate hypotheses all the time, because neither of them accepts that explanation as gospel.

It's the logical basis of Atlas's spell, but he questions if it didn't turn out right because it's logic was off base and lead magic down an alternate path that the first spell didn't follow.

Spellwriting is like when you leave a social interaction overthinking what someone said and why they'd say that, except you can't ask for clarification - just having to deal with that ambiguity forever because coming up with a reasonable explanation doesn't necessarily rule out some batshit reason because the "person" in question does things for weird reasons in addition to logical ones.

Which is frustrating for them since it's their job to know for sure how a spell will perform when activated.

Atlas was about 20 and working as a delivery boy for a few random shops including an ink shop that supplied the local spellwriters. Hyssop was 28 and had recently started apprenticing with said spellwriters (20/28 is well within the "sub-adult" age group)

He unknowingly left out a crucial step in the process, and magic, unlike a totally unintelligent process that might simply stop dead at that point, came up with it's own solution to get to the next step in the process and proceed.

The reason he didn't realize the step was missing is because he didn't realize it was necessary for the spell's potency to gain access to the interior of the body through a physical entry point. Magic can pass through solid materials so it didn't occur to him to include how or where it was allowed to create that physical entry point, he thought it could just go where it needed to be as it often does in other spells.

That's partly because of their own bodies - part of the spell relies on the magic system that supports Saratoan skin pigmentation, but that pigment also acts as a soft barrier to magic trying to pass through them. It went so hard for the mouth because of the lack of pigment there.

It's sort of like if you sent someone to go to your house and leave a package inside but you didn't know your doors were locked so it never occurred to you to give them a key or add "find key under fake rock" to the instructions, so they broke a window to get inside rather than just stop and say they found a flaw in your instructions and they can't proceed.

It's easy to think Atlas' spell failed too because he has scars as well, but his were planned. He accepted that apparently the spell needs a wound and wrote the exact amount of damage he felt he could live with into the spell and wrote in the logistics of healing it as quickly as possible.

His failure was that it didn't come out as potent, and he remains unsure if the spell somehow works on a more wound = more better kind of logic or if the process of the spell rewriting itself in Hyssop lead to something more effective than either of them know how to write (since it had to invent so many extra steps the version actually in his body isn't exactly what Hyssop actually wrote). He mostly thinks it's the latter but is too afraid of the former to let anyone else continue the experiment.

He was extremely upset about it and traumatized and it permanently affected his personality (Hyssop and Atlas were not always seemingly opposite types of people) but at the same time he couldn't stop thinking about it for decades after.

Atlas went into spellwriting with an attitude of "once I know what I'm doing then the hazards will be obvious and easy to avoid, the warnings are because I'm inexperienced" so after he witnessed that, he asked everyone he could find to explain why it happened and he got a lot of shrugs. It made him realize that the adults weren't actually as totally knowledgeable as he thought. Which he found totally intolerable.

He became obsessed with that spell because he felt like understanding it would allow him to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Eventually researching and studying it turned into rewriting it. Once he felt like he understood it, and had rewritten it completely in a form he believed he could predict, he couldn't let go of the possibility that he still didn't actually understand, since that version was untested.

Default people isn't how I roll, so here is an assortment of characters who are considered unremarkable sizes for their species (and José for scale)

Luz is a *little* remarkable, he's considered short, but a common kind of short. He's included because I know he confuses people haha. Renwick is more average.

He isn't aware of it but it's mentally taxing to control all four parts of his mouth so he kind of trades off between speaking normally, speaking with one half, and then the other, in a cycle.

Many Saratoan families view "one-off" pregnancies from unexpected members of a generation (or a family getting a second dedicated mother) as just a bonus - that's less likely to happen if that family plays favorites and makes everything adversarial.