auroraexpress | (no subject)

Who: Tabby and anyone
When: Day 3, Noon
Where: Lounge

[The Lounge screen flickers to life as a memory starts to play. Today's feature film:

The viewpoint of this memory is from a quite small person, and it soon becomes apparent that it is a childhood memory. The young Tabby is playing the flute in a garden just outside of a small adobe cottage. Another girl, about seven, dressed in a simple white linen dress listens intently on a nearby bench. Tabby plays slowly, making a few mistakes, but continuing to play the short tune. After repeating it a few times, she puts the instrument down.

"I'm still practicing it," she says. Her young voice is uncharacteristically cheerful.

The girl on the bench beams. "That was really good! Way better than me with the lyre."

"No way. It's just because it's a really easy-"

They are interrupted by a call from the house, as an older woman, somewhere between forty and fifty steps out. She has a warm smile on her face, and Tabby immediately focuses her full attention on her. "Come get some lunch, you two virtuosos!"

"Yes, Auntie Kerhet," they reply in unison.

The girls start to enter the house, but not before Tabby turns and says "I really do want to hear you play too, Alua!"

The other girl laughs. "It's bad."

"I've listened to bad music before."

"Hey!"

As the memory ends, Tabby continues to sit and watch the screen, a small smile playing across her face. Still, her expression looks longing, lonely, even. It's a happy memory, but it's difficult somehow for her to process the feelings that its summoning.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ah. Interesting. You do not fit the image one might think of, but then I suppose that many necromancers do not.

[says the gloomy non-necromancer]

We get that a lot, but at my level we're all just more academia nerds.

I suppose it would involve a fair bit of studying, after all.

Oh for sure! I have to study to do it at all, and then besides that I use it to study the animals that I'm animating. So I'm a practical necromancer, but there's an actual theoretical field of study, too— I've had a couple advisors that almost never did any field magic, they just liked to write and think about it.

So, they're like philosophers? They don't have some other job, like being priests?

They're more like mathematicians or physicists. A lot of them teach.

I can understand teaching, and researching magic. It just seems strange that they would hardly ever use their skills practically.

I could give their reasons, but I'm not of that mindset. I ditched the advisors that didn't like me doing practical stuff!

Some people do prefer a quiet life, so I suppose I understand it.

I don't mind quiet, but I'm not going to learn to summon dead skeletons and then not do that.

Sounds reasonable. I thought practical necromancy was more about helping people talk to family members and things of that nature.

Nooooo no no no, gosh no. Humans are way off-limits!

[???]

So you only perform it on other races like the Maru or the Thraags? Wouldn't people want to talk to their ancestors?

I don't know what those are, but I only do animals. Even if someone animates a human, nobody is going to do that and try to bring memories with them. Souls and bodies both degrade after death, and neither is hospitable to who the person used to be.

Edited 2018-12-06 04:42 (UTC)

Seems like rather limited necromancy, then.

It's not limited, it's ethical.

I suppose so. I was just surprised that it was not possible to contact the souls of the dead. I thought that necromancers could even enter the Underworld in some circumstances. Perhaps your system of magic is different.

It's a different system of magic, and... probably the actual composition of our souls and how they're affected by death is different, too. Basically, my world's souls start falling apart after death. It's like throwing a finished puzzle into a lake, then trying to put it back together later.

Rather unnerving to consider the possibility that even the concept of "self" is not constant between worlds.

I wouldn't say so? There's already differences in my world between animals and magical beasts in what their souls generate, and then there's worlds where people have wings or live for 200 years. If that can all can be different, why not worlds where souls function differently, too?