#sylph class

Empty hills and stretches of grass as far as the eye can see. A cool breeze skims the land, carrying a distant tune and rustling the gentle underbrush. 

This is LOPFAS, the Land of Plain Fields and Symphonies

LOPFAS is a remarkably flat land devoid of much of the extreme terrain that most other worlds have. It has no extreme elevations, no mountains or valleys, and no extreme weather, simply an eternal, gently windy spring. It does however possess a variety of minor (albeit bare) biomes from small, sparse outcroppings of trees, ominous empty plains, and sloping hills that dot the world. Amidst the different biomes are various rivers and lakes that snake and bend, cutting the land across and creating distinct lines between the dull emptiness where small consort towns and villages are built.

At a glance, there truly is nothing remarkable to this world. 

But then you hear the music.

Somewhere in the distance, *always in the distance*, is a melody with no distinct source, seemingly radiating from the world itself. This music is typically gentle and pleasant, if boring. At best it can be described as elevator music.

Hidden across the world are long dilapidated buildings and hidden ruins, marked with glyphs and sigils with arcane and musical information. Study of these symbols would reveal the music of the land to not simply be an afterthought, but the primary feature, a legendary effect known as the World Song.

Sometime in the ancient past, before the awakening of the denizen, LOPFAS looked drastically different. The empty fields and empty hills of the world were once the groundwork of an incredible world of wild savannah, fields of bountiful wheat and tall grasses, lush hills, flower meadows, and more!

The endless monotony of LOPFAS is really just the unused staging ground for a once beautiful and varied world, an unused canvas. Maintained by the eternal World Song.

While LOPFAS’s dull design is a tragedy in and of itself, it has only now become a matter of true concern. Underlings have started to appear across the world, terrorizing the consorts, spurned on by the World Song, to destroy and raze and eradicate what little is left of LOPFAS until it is a still world of dust and ash forever.

Each day the World Song only grows louder as the underling hoard grows larger and more organized with its tune. To make matters worse, the consorts have slowly but surely succumb to the lethargy and torpor caused by the World Song with many simply laying down to die at the feet of the underlings or wandering the empty fields in fugue states or in desperate bids for survival, hoping to escape the underling tides.

Things are bad. Worse than bad. It’s as if the entire world is going crazy and being unwound, like a broken metronome, slowing everyone and everything until an eventual stop.

Unless…

The Sylph of Time must find the source of the World Song, disrupt the monotonous music killing the land, and stave off the growing underling armies!

But can they make it in time?

Denzien suggestions: Harpocrates, greek god of silence, secrets, and confidentiality. Additionally, the original deity, Horus the child, god of the newborn sun and dawn.

Features

The Barren Lands

The worst area affected by the ruining of the World Song, the barren lands are a vast stretch of flatlands remarkable only for their gray skies, still air, and lack of any noise besides the maddening echoes of the World Song. Sensation itself seems to die here with sound, color, and even other sensations like taste or smell, seemingly fading away here.

Depressed and maddened consorts have aimlessly wandered into the Barren Lands seemingly to die, to cease to be all together and become unmade. Lucid consorts avoid this area at all costs as an incredible number of underlings spawn or gather here.

The Daias

Atop the tallest hill in the land, surrounded by the ruins of an ancient temple, lies The Daias. The Daias is marked with the same arcane and musical sigils and glyphs that can be found across the world, serving as the central piece to these scattered puzzle pieces.

The Daias gives an incredible view over the world, allowing easy view to the largest lake and the many rivers that stem from it, and from there, the many miniature, albeit currently suffering, biomes of the Land of Plain Fields and Symphonies.

According to legend, the Sylph of Time is able to conduct the World Song itself from atop the Daias, altering the flow of time itself across LOPFAS and indeed the session itself.

Sylph of time powers

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when we think of healing, we think of gentle, nurturing actions. being gentle, taking it slow, being cared for and cared about. but neither maid nor sylph do any of that. the healers in canon are all specifically extremely violent. kanaya is a nurturer, yes, but this is instead because of her connection to the space aspect, and she is also a warrior who kills multiple people with a fair amount of ease. aradia takes gleeful joy in destroying timelines and watching the fabric of paradox space be ripped apart. aranea attempts to stage a violent coup on reality itself, and breaks jake's mind with her powers. jane kills karkat just to violently rip him from the grave, purely as a show of what she's capable of. this is not gentle shit. it's violence.

i think this speaks a lot to the kind of environment that skaia cultivates. where "healing" cannot truly be healing. they don't have the time for that. they have to play the game. they have to fight enemies, they have to breed the genesis frog, and fight the king, and everything else that comes with playing. they do not have time for healing. this goes for mental healing, too. none of the characters ever have any time to process trauma because they always have to just keep moving. keep progressing. they have to win. this is, of course, just working as designed. take young, impressionable kids, turn them into weapons, irreparably traumatize them, and dump them out on the other side as soon as their purpose creating a new universe is complete.

For some reason Tumblr is just Refusing to publish my gigantic response to this question, so since its an anon anyway I'm screenshotting the question and posting the response below. Haven't had to do this shit since the tumblr days of yore lmao

My Response:

The Pairings aren't entirely unrelated to the active passive system, they're deeply ingrained into it still.

all the class common pairs are pairings between an - active class and a + passive class with two very big exceptions:

the MostActive Active Class and the MostPassive Active class are paired, Witch and Sylph

and the MostActive Passive Class and the MostPassive Passive class are paired, Maid and Heir

WitchSylph and MaidHeir are essentially microcosms of the active passive scale inside the active or passive halves respectively, theyre still paired as MostActive and MostPassive pairs both.

But you could also think of them as where the two ends of the active or passive side overlap into the other side.

like for example Maid and Sylph technically existing on both scales where they overlap in the middle

Maid can be considered a Class that's so In-Active, that it flips over into the Passive side by technicality and thus is a Passive class.

Sylph likewise being considered a Class that so Im-Passive, that it flips over into the Active Side by technicality and thus is an Active class.

Maid and Sylph just kind of exist in their own space in my head like that

IF you consider the active passive scale to be similar to the PH Scale between acidic and basic, what I imagine is going on is essentially that the least acidic acid, which has acid inside it, also has enough basic inside it that it balances out to be on the basic end of the scale.

its kinda like math that says -3 and +4 = +1

I DO Believe the Pairings of WitchSylph as a common pair, share a common power, I Believe they are the Change/Manipulation/Transformation pair, regardless of the specific verb used in any case or by any character, the power overall is the umbrella of Change, I've always thought that of the powers, that it's not about coming down to a single verb.

just as i Do Believe the Pairing of MaidHeir as a common pair, also shares a common power, I believe they are the Creation umbrella pair

Essentially all the canon reveal has done for me is flip where i think of Heir and Sylph in the powers

But as terms to call them when talking about them like that like if its Active Change and Active Change how do you differentiate, in my head instead of saying Active and Passive, I've been thinking of it like this:

Active and In-Active for WitchSylph Im-Passive and Passive for MaidHeir

Because if Both Sylph and Maid classes are in the middle of the scale, can they really be considered either Passive or Active in that sense? when theyre barely a value above 0 in either direction etc

especially with my earlier metaphor of me thinking of them on the acidic/basic scale as being roughly equal mixes of both that lean to either side.

I'm also aware that's a tad headcanony though, because the canon answer more likely is that despite being a common pairing, the powers of a pair that share activity level are just more strongly differentiated on the power side instead, aka they're more likely to use a different specific verb to describe their powers

Consider this piece of text in canon:

"both classes in +/- pairs tend to have very similar descriptions." and right after that Prince and Bard, as an +/- Active Passive pair is given to us with Active Destroy and Passive Destroy, essentially

What that implies is that the opposite is true for the other cases aka: "Both classes in +/+ or -/- pairs tend to have very different descriptions."

and this comes down to the very specific niche verbs used to represent each class in particular, like how Page's verb was revealed one time to be part of the "Fights to Preserve" as a whole, and since it's an active/passive pair with Knight, Knight is then also Active Fight to Preserve etc

So the canonical Answer is just that Despite Witch and Sylph being a common pair, because they are an active/active pair, their powers are gonna be describe with different Verbs, so they will end up being as Active X and Active Y in the simple definitions

same for Maid and Heir, despite being a common pair, they are a passive/passive pair so their specific verbs will end up being something like "Passive A and Passive B"

But

I will bet you dollars to dickens, that whatever verb is chosen to be X or Y for Witch and Sylph, both will be connected to the umbrella of Change/Transformation/Manipulation, the idea of one thing becoming a different thing

and the same goes for Maid and Heir, whatever verbs get chosen for A or B you could place into the Umbrella of Creation, the idea of creating something new that didn't exist previously inside a location

In this way, the regular Inversion Pairs remain mostly the same, with just Heir and Sylph flipping to each other spots

so the inversion pairs for this Theory are as follows:

Witch >< Seer Mage >< Sylph Prince >< Heir Maid >< Bard Thief >< Page Knight >< Rogue

BUT There is an alternatively theory, which changes the inversion pairs a bit more drastically, because it changes the entire Umbrella Terms of the 6 Major Functions to being slightly different ones

If Destruction being all male and Creation being all female is no longer a major axis, no longer a major core of class theory, then is Creation/Destruction even the proper axis of classes at all?

Knights and Pages mind you are already no longer just the umbrella of Application, the idea of using what's there without knowing/moving/creating/changing/destroying, but Specifically Fighting to Preserve, its a slightly different idea of not just about using what you've got, but making sure its kept in stasis, preserved as well

Fight to Preserve is a term that is specifically opposed to Destruction in it's definition, it's fighting to preserve it against the forces of Destruction, like Defending it from an Attack.

Maids and Heirs aren't Creating something so much as they are Serving and Inheriting it literally to use specific terms, both very close to the idea of Giving and Gifts

Thieves and Rogues are to Steal…

So what if the opposed pairs here are not create destroy and apply move

but Preserve and Destroy and Give and Take?

Protection/Destruction, to Build Up to the Top or to Tear Down to the Bottom

versus Inherit or Theft, Serve or Rob, Give Forwards and Take Back.

Up, Down, Forwards, Back, an axis of movement in all four directions

leaving two quantum quark positions left: Strange and Charm I Mean Change and Know

That would make the inversion class pairs akin to all the opposite positions of the six Quantum Quark orientations in a way

and they would be like this:

Witch >< Seer Mage >< Sylph Prince >< Page Knight >< Bard Thief >< Heir Maid >< Rogue

some may prefer this flavor of inversion theory since it more closely aligns to the very Literal verbs used for each of the classes

At the moment, I'm still more closely connected to the idea of the powers of the 6 classes not Just being 6 literal verbs but still 6 Umbrella Functions that just also Contain the most common used verbs as Simplified descriptions of the overall powers

but being so fr if Hussie described his class bible document as being little more than the pairing's he revealed plus the list of verbs they used

he almost definitely didn't put as much thought into this system as i have and the stuff and system that I've made I'm more and more convinced is less a describing of canon intent and more an expansion of fandom intent

and I already figured that ever since we got the Aspect Wheel of canon stuff relating to the aspects, I've been calling my work even then "Dahni Expansions"

So I mean, there's the two different answers I would give on this subject, lol

Because i just Like my own ideas better because of course I do, for now im sticking with Option A

of course ^_^

knight of history (light+space)

page of pride (breath+heart)

mother of birth (knight+maid of mind+space)

polluter of skepticism (bard+sylph of breath+rage)