Tape Hiss

It’s a grab-bag category with no bearing on biology whatsoever! The actual definition changes depending on who’s using it, but in general, in the comic and with the characters we see most often, it’s used to refer to anyone who isn’t a spirit or a human.

The term is used because, in the most generalized way possible, monsters are sort of separated from humans and spirits through circumstance--like spirits have their own society and problems and etc, and so do humans, and then you have these myriad other species that, while they certainly have their own communities and frictions between them, also bleed together quite a lot. It’s a collective term.

Technically reifa would be considered monsters just by definition alone, but they did also have their own society and issues that didn’t overlap with other species so very much--so like, back when they were their own entity around the time of the war, you probably wouldn’t refer to them with the collective term ‘monster’ but now that they (if they’re still around at all) wouldn’t be any more than a few individuals that would exist in communities that would have to overlap with many other species, maybe you would? It’s less a question of biology and more a sociological thing.

By this definition, Aetheri’s the only world we see in the comic that doesn’t have monsters native to it. Unless you count the thyft, which technically you could, but you probably wouldn’t.

The Symphony Archipelago, excluding Enodia, is currently arguing quite a lot over gun control. Guns can be quite effective against non-humans, they’re just not a guarantee. One almost killed Teige, after all--but on the other hand, casting shields against bullets is a pretty basic skill if you’ve got the right sort of magic for that. The big argument in the Archipelago right now is fear-mongering ‘we need guns to protect ourselves from monsters!’ vs the rebuttal that 1) monsters aren’t attacking people and 2) how you gonna keep the monsters from getting guns, anyway.

Enodia has very strict gun control. They can’t be sold and they aren’t allowed within city limits. Enodia also has a lot of strict controls on public display of powers as well, because when you live in a city full of magical creatures, there’s got to be something in place to protect the general health of the population.

Just combating the trade locally has been the strategy for a few centuries now, and it’s the strategy that more isolationist spirits insist ought to be good enough, but it just doesn’t work. The spirit population of Aetheri has been steadily declining anyway, due almost entirely to the trade picking people off. This strategy also does absolutely nothing for the people who *do* get taken--there’s no one looking for them, no help repatriating them if they manage to escape. Most sensible Aetherians will admit that without trying to combat the trade both externally and internally, people will just keep disappearing and not being found.

One thing about Aetheri is that the xenophobia, for most people, is not nearly as strong as the desire to combat the trade. There’s a very vocal minority of xenophobes who would rather keep trying to use ineffective techniques to combat the trade than support RIT, but most people aren’t like that. There’s an ever-growing ‘middle’ ground of the population that, while they may not like offworlders and don’t want to see them assimilated into Aetherian culture, they’d much rather have that happen if it will protect them and their loved ones from the trade by having RIT created.

He was born with wings! They were very small little naked chicken wings that were so tightly wedged against his back that they didn’t realize what they were immediately.

Nothing was particularly painful, but the first feathers growing in were very itchy. He used to rub his wings against fences and trees to scratch them when he thought no one was looking. It’s like, when you shave and your hair starts growing back in, but times a million.

The ‘Angel’ question tackles a thing I have been overthinking for years, actually, which is: what does the Symphony Archipelago think angels look like? Presumably they have an analog of Christianity given how many times Liya and Hawk say ‘oh my god’ and such, but the depiction of angels as winged humanoids doesn’t have to be the norm there as it is on Earth really...long story short, no. He’s entertained a lot of small children who thought he looked very cool, though. Little kids generally like the giant man with wings, he’s sort of aw-inspiring when you only come up to his knees.

Well it sort of depends. She can technically practice in Aetheri without a license, she just won’t get paid by the state for anything she does. (Yes, this is a terrible systemic flaw.) Her citizenship doesn’t depend on that at all, though. I talk about this some in my post on immigration, but her big issue now is time. She was 15 when she entered Aetheri, which means she will not be eligible for full citizenship for another 7.5 years, if she stays out of fucking trouble all that time. She can work in Aetheri during that time, sure--it just means if she gets in any trouble at all she’s probably gonna get booted out.

Yes and no! Some of both. Different species have different incidences of types of magic that manifest within them, if that makes sense? A good two to compare as an example are spirits and humans, actually. There are plenty members of both species that can shapeshift (neither absolutely cannot) but there are many more humans that can learn to shapeshift than spirits. It’s a species thing but also a mental thing--spirits are just less changeable inherently than humans, it seems like, maybe something to do with the long lives. But then there are plenty of spirits with a mindset for shapeshifting as well, it’s by no means all or nothing.

I talk about this some in my post on medicine and magic! Liya’s specific kind of healing takes control of the actual movement of cells (rather than speed up the cells’ natural inclination to mend themselves, as the more passive type of healing magic does.) So where ‘passive’ healers merely direct cells to do what they’d normally do to fix things but faster and more efficient, Liya has the ability to make them do...the opposite of that.

Liya started manifesting her powers pretty early on--by age 3 she was starting to heal little bruises and such. Svetlana (mom) had a powerful aversion to anything remotely supernatural that had gotten worse and worse because Hawk was a Ghost-Seeing Child and Liya’s clear magical gift aggravated that. 

One day she got fed up and literally just called Emry--spoke to him for the first time in a couple years to tell him he ought to come get his sister, or ‘who knows what would happen to her.’ (Really meaning she’d give Liya up for adoption, which would be extra hard on a little magical girl with a chip on her shoulder in this particular time and place. Who knows indeed.) This was the first(!) Emry was hearing that he even HAD a sister, but he couldn’t in good conscience abandon her. So he blew his savings at that moment on a plane ticket and went to pick her up.

The utility spells in Aetheri can be used by literally anyone who’s got magic in any capacity--they’re the magical equivalent of light switches or doorbells, mechanisms that perform a more complicated task with a very simple user interface, except in this case they use energy from the user themselves rather than being wired or somesuch.

Hmmmm. I suppose a truth seer can lie to themselves like anyone can, but I don’t know if they can do it to the point where they believe it themselves. Maybe it’d depend on how the lie manifests to them--if it’s something they can ignore or not.

Well because truth seers are so relatively common, Aetheri’s got a sort of different culture around lying in general. People will still be dishonest, of course, but you’ll almost never catch an Aetherian telling a flat-out lie. It’s far more common to sort of talk circles around the truth, or phrase things in a misleading way, or tell enough of the truth to satisfy a truth seer without quite being out with all of it. There is very little lying going on in Aetherian government--instead, there is a lot of silence, inaccessibility, and deflection. I mention in my post on the government that the Assembly meetings aren’t open to the public--that’s why, really. Easier to avoid answering to people if they just can’t reach you.

Well, it depends on where they’re caught, exactly. The slavers that the Order catches, if they are not killed in the capture attempt (which happens very often, honestly) are sent through Enodia’s justice system, which is rather different and usually ends with the slaver being deported back to wherever they’re from with the idea that they face justice there. If they’re caught in Aetheri by the army or somesuch, they go through the Aetherian justice system instead. There’s been some mixed results with this, as the Aetherian justice system is kind of successful due to the way their society is structured, and slavers often come from outside of that.

Aries is a special case. :3 But disregarding the Special Case part of it, he’d probably ultimately be thrown in one of the isolated countryside prisons in Aetheri, after going through some legal shenanigans depending on who caught him.

I answered some of this in a previous post, but for the rest: 

Theoretically, you could permanently seal someone’s magic, but to do so is considered cruel and unusual--mostly because of the way it would need to be done, through either tattooing or (more reliably) implanting a dampening spell in some way (inlaying metal beneath the skin somewhere?) Bodily sovereignty is considered really important to Aetherians, so forcibly modifying someone’s body in this way is considered a big No.

In the post I linked I mentioned how ‘prison’ is rehabilitative up until an arbitrary point where it’s decided you can’t be rehabilitated. Until that point, the places you’re kept are reasonably nice--they’re various campuses, more or less, staffed well enough, state-run and therefore free, safe and secure, where you stay while doing whatever counseling or whatnot was assigned to you. For people in this level of the system, yeah, they can essentially go on with their lives otherwise.

Past that point, prison is not super great. There aren’t many criminals that get to this point, honestly, so prisons--located in isolated countryside--are mostly empty. They get to move about large parts of the campus freely, but often cannot interact with other prisoners and only see guards for mealtimes. These places are very old and heavily spelled against escape, and they’re silent and dark. The isolation can get to a person. But other abuses are largely absent--prisoners are fed and clothed and kept dry and given the minimum care they need. Every once in a while someone will bust out of these places, but then they have hundreds of miles of open fields to cross without being caught.

Good question! This isn’t an exhaustive list, but...

Imports: Wood, textiles (cotton and synthetic fabrics), dyes, spices, honey, cane sugar

Exports: Quarried stone, precious stones and metals, spellwork, textiles (embroidered/dyed), alcohol, glasswork, metalwork

The du Russi family oversees quite a lot of this trade, and there are quite a lot of common-sense regulations on imports/exports. For example, Aetheri is very careful about introducing invasive species, so you can’t import live plants or animals that are able to reproduce.

It’s on all the time for most people, although some can just kind of...dissociate until they don’t notice it. It depends how it manifests for each person. For most people, detecting a lie is just like--you hear a lie, and you know it’s a lie as if you already knew what the actual truth was, even if you really didn’t. It’s not a particularly invasive ability, for most people, so turning it off isn’t really an issue.

The Cynn is kind of its own thing. He doesn’t have absolute power, but neither does the Assembly he confronts in chapter 6, so they can deadlock each other, which is what they’re doing over RIT now.

What the Cynn does have more or less autonomy over is international relations, which is just vague enough a concept that it’s been expanded to have to do with immigration and homeland security (which really just means ‘dealing with the slave trade’ right now.) Rhys used this to create the Royal Order, which he could just Do, because it’s just Aetherian resources used for it. RIT requires getting into a UN-like situation with other nations, which the Assembly can and have been refusing to approve. Numair’s now trying to force their hand by creating everything else to do with RIT short of that--eventually he’ll have everything in place but this agreement from the Assembly, at which point it becomes pretty clear to the public at large who is keeping RIT from happening.