World Traveler's Song

Player Information

Name: Stareyes
Age: 38
Contact details: beccastareyes@ Plurk
Other characters: Zelgadis Greywords, Thomas Price

Character Information

Name: S’reee
Canon: Young Wizards
Canon Point: Post-Games Wizards Play
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: CRAU from Melodies of Eternity (melodiesofeternity); re-app after a drop from VoidTrekkers
Age: 7 While cross-species ages are inexact, S’reee is equivalent to a teenager.

World Information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Wizards

Imagine a universe that seems mostly like our own. Earth exists, and history mostly seems to have proceeded as expected. Gravity and electromagnetism and the various nuclear forces work, chemistry happens, stars turn hydrogen into helium, and entropy means that energy is more and more evenly distributed, making it harder to get useful work done.

And there are wizards. Wizards say long ago, the One Power (which could be Its own thing, or simply all the Powers that Be acting in concert) created the sheaf of worlds via Wizards’ Speech (called The Speech). However, one Power (who, like all the Powers that Be goes by many names), added entropy to the laws of physics and after a giant argument, stormed out. This Power became known as the Lone Power. Life arose, and the Powers granted some life the ability to use the Speech to make changes, a process called Enacture. Those people were called wizards and their first major task was to complete na Ordeal: a problem that required a new wizard.

Because of the entropic nature of the universe, wizards inevitably appear young, around adolescence, and are at their most powerful when they first become wizards. The Lone Power exercised Its status as member of the Powers that Be to make a personal appearance in a Wizard’s Ordeal to try to muck it up. The Lone Power also would appear when an intelligent species was first getting started (usually around the time the first wizards appeared) to offer them a Choice: some change to what they would be as a species (that would further the Lone Power’s goals) that usually meant the universe would be a little worse for accepting it.

For instance, on Earth, a number of species faced their choice: at least one type of dinosaur, cats, dogs, humans and whales/dolphins (as a group of species that had formed a community). The whales’ Choice is immortalized in an epic song called the Song of the Twelve. The Lone Power came as a new sort of whale to the first ten whale-wizards, seemingly to ask what his status was, but actually to offer each power in exchange for some nebulous other thing. Three accepted, three declined and three dithered, but the tenth whale, the Silent One, sussed out that this offer would mean fear of death and loss would dominate them. So she deliberately not only refused, but martyred herself via the Master Shark (who cures all distress by eating the bearer) to seal that aspect of the Lone Power away. (The Lone Power, being outside of time, wasn’t permanently gone, just weakened; wizards get used to the fact that they are delaying Entropy and its Creator, but may never win.)

Periodically, whales would need to perform a combination passion-play and human cetacean sacrifice, re-enacting the Song of the Twelve, to maintain the seal and alleviate the natural disasters that particular part of the Lone Power would cause. For an example of what can go wrong, the legends of Atlantis were caused by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge swallowing a small continental plate, aggravated by a Song of the Twelve re-enactment disrupted catastrophically by the Lone Power. (That is one reason the Lone Power still participates in the ceremony — sure, most of the time It gets to cool Its heels in the Atlantic Ocean for a few more decades rather than cause trouble; occasionally it can wreak horrible natural disasters on both sea and shore.)

It should be said that modern humans are generally assumed to be culturally incapable of accepting wizardry and non-human sapients (either the ones on their planet, or the ones who live elsewhere in the universe), so this happens mostly without human awareness beyond human wizards and colleagues (which are maybe one in ten thousand people).

In addition to regular battles with the Lone Power, whale and dolphin-wizards tend to a lot of tasks of managing Earth’s oceans, as other species tend to the land. Typically humans make up most of Earth’s wizard population simply by sheer numbers, though various wizardries allow wizards of many species to congregate if no humans not in on the secret are present. (This can vary from ‘meet on the far side of the Moon’ to ‘wizardries to conceal appearance (which works best for human-sized wizards)’ to ‘meet in a convention hall with the World’s Most Boring Font Face on the sign to deter the muggles’.)

Speaking of space, aliens are a thing. So are trips off planet — the Moon is a common staging ground for pan-Earth events among wizards. (And also being tourists, though the Apollo 11 landing site is off-limits, as is any place with an active rover/lander.)

Personal History: S'reee's major appearance is in Deep Wizardry, the second book. S'reee presumably followed the traditional wizard's path. She was offered the Wizard's Oath by the Powers sometime after she was independent of her mother, and had to undergo some Ordeal to 'pay back' the initial rush of power. She succeeded, and was working with a more senior wizard, Ae'mhnuu, to organize a re-enactment of the Song of the Twelve. Things went bad, Ae'mhnuu was killed by whalers, and S'reee was injured, then harassed by sharks to the point of beaching herself. A colleague (Hotshot, a dolphin) saw her plight and found the nearest healer, a human named Nita Callahan. Nita saved S'reee's life, and she and her partner offer to help with the Song. The preparations are plagued with disaster upon disaster, complete with one role betraying them to the Lone Power during the ritual, but it goes off successfully.

The Powers that Be were apparently impressed with her organization of the Song, as, during a crisis when all of Earth's adult wizards lost their powers, S'reee was put in charge of all of Earth's oceans, one step below Earth's Planetary Wizard, leaving her to mitigate damage on a world where everyone was getting more and more paranoid. Since the major crisis seemed to be 'humans are paranoid and some of them have nukes', her actions may have been more support. In between crises, S'reee continued working with Nita and learning more about humans while coping with local problems (pollution, noise cancelation, testing magic items that let non-whales turn into whales). She also is dating a non-wizard whale who does something in between food and travel blogging (he writes and sings songs about different sorts of food and where to find them).

Personality: We know a few things tend to be true of wizards in general. While the ability is genetic, it is only offered to people the Powers think can make a difference: those who notice that the world isn't what it should be, and they want to make it better. Having been in practice for several years, and experienced several crises, S'reee isn't going to try to make the world better all at once. She's usually the wizard keeping everyone on task and not tackling the next problem while still trying to make progress on the first. When Kit notices that humans have left unexploded ordinance dumped at the bottom of the harbor from WWII, S'reee is the one who reminds them that they need to test their current spell (for pollution) first. S'reee is the one who brings extra air on their trip to the bottom of the sea for the Song of the Twelve, because, be prepared.

S'reee keeps a cool head under pressure (including the pressure of the abyssal sea floor) -- while seriously wounded, her first concern was making sure the sharks trying to finish the job weren't harmed by the rescue party, as she'd need their goodwill later to get the Master Shark to help with the Song of the Twelve. Wizards are supposed to be cautious in their use of lethal force against any being, especially the more intelligent ones. While being a carnivore living in the ocean meant some compromise was allowed -- the natural cycles of predator and prey were considered unavoidable parts of the universe, and apparently the Lone Power thought mutating giant squid for funsies was a good way to stop undersea rituals -- the wizard's oath makes if clear that taking a life is only an option to prevent suffering. Don't increase entropy more than necessary, children.

We also know a bit about S'reee from her role in the Song of the Twelve, which is not just based on her species, but her personality. The Singer is the role she sings, but she does note that she would have taken the Silent One if Nita hadn't volunteered. What we know about the Singer is that she was offered mastery of song which could carry the emotion to break any heart that hears it, but was able to decline this gift for fear of its cost. That suggests that S'reee herself might also idolize the art and feeling of song, not just its use as communication (unusual in a female humpback, which aren't the singers that males are). She is the kind of person who wants to care about others, but also have them care about her.

The Silent One, meanwhile, is explicitly a young person who hasn't yet developed an adult's relationships and bitterly regrets it, but that isn't going to stop her martyrdom to fight the Lone Power. This fits S'reee's general attitude towards her duty: when it comes down on it, she can do it, but doesn't see why she has to pretend she's not making a sacrifice. She is vocal about complaining when given authority, but she then shuts up and gets the job done to the best of her ability. She is not a formal person -- any formal language required by wizardry (and as the Art is heavily language based, there is some, albeit with many local variations) can get S'reee complaining, and the two times she is given a Senior position in canon, she makes it clear that she can't wait to get rid of it and is very happy when she does. One of the bits of banter Nita and S'reee have is when Nita uses her former titles, and S'reee is all 'thank the Sea I got rid of that'.

Given that Nita was the one who ended up with the Silent One role, that made S'reee feel guilty for not being completely certain the human knew what she was volunteering for -- not just that it was Important and an Honor, but that it required the singer's death at the climax of the ritual. S'reee was feeling sufficiently overwhelmed by both being the Senior Wizard coordinating everything, singing a role herself (which was dangerous, even if not certain death), that she didn't ask questions she should have when someone else offered to take the Most Important Role. This could have easily driven S'reee and Nita apart, but they ended up bonding over their similar temperaments once Nita unexpectedly survived the ritual. Both could learn from each other's reactions to duty -- Nita in not trying to carry it alone, and S'reee learning a bit of empathy and perspective as she realized that a human wouldn't get the celebration and remembrance that a whale would for this duty, as few humans even knew of the Song of the Twelve. S'reee already had shared the experience of her injury with Nita as the latter healed her, but this deepened S'reee's bond with the human wizard. As far as S'reee is concerned, Nita is her sister in all but birth. On a lighter note, it also taught S'reee (and Nita) the value of having someone with a vastly different set of problems in their personal lives (beyond both being social species in between childhood and full adulthood) but a common set of professional problems.

S'reee's position as a whale wizard who works with human coworkers on problems caused by humans means she's had to learn subtlety. While most non-human species of wizard on Earth (and off-world) are open with other members of their species, for various reasons, humans are considered under interdict and all wizards keep wizardry and the knowledge of other intelligent species out of the human public eye. Consequently, S'reee's home territory (around Long Island Sound) has her trouble-shooting things while having to work with more subtlety than she had to in the open ocean. Some of her CRAU (as mentioned below) was adapting to a world where magic and non-humans were a common occurrence. While wizards can leave the planet (or planetary system, or even galaxy on rare occasions), most of S'reee's work prior to the CRAU seems to have kept her in her home oceans. Her few trips off-world were in the company of humans, or humans and other Earth species (as cats run the intersystem transport network). Her size also means that most wizards she works with come to her: while it is theoretically possible that S'reee could use wizardry to take human form and go walk around a human city, as far as we know, she's never tried that on Earth. It could be that S'reee isn't willing to be discomforted by being so out of her element (literally and figuratively). Or it simply is too much power in a spell for no gain, and a lot of confusion if S'reee causes a problem or needs to do an emergency abort.

But her duty and the common saying among wizards that 'there are no accidents' (meaning: if you find yourself in an unusual situation, it's probably because the Powers that Be need you to be there to do something) means that she'll be out and about doing things, even thought she continues her focus on the oceans. There may still be a bit of childish whining, especially if she trusts that she doesn't have to be the serious Dignified Sometimes-Senior wizard around you.

CRAU developments: In Melodies of Eternity, S’reee had to adapt to a number of changes. For one, she went from being a normal humpback whale to only about 8 feet long so she could actually fit into typical dwellings (outside of regions dominated by shorter species, where even normal-sized humans feel cramped). This required a lot adaptation to swimming and eating — humpbacks swallow their food whole, and while most krill was still edible to her, she did have to be more careful about fish. It also meant S’reee didn’t feel comfortable alone in the open ocean, especially if she needed to rest. She was dolphin sized so she really should have found a pod (if one had existed). But one of the biggest changes was that because S’reee was surrounded by bipeds, she actually got to see a lot of how human (or other land/amphibious biped) society worked up close, rather than from the water or from her human friends. She had a house (albeit one in an underwater city, set up for the comfort of an air breathing swimmer) as she didn’t consider it wise to rest in the open ocean without a pod, and lacked access to full wizardry to keep items safe. She had an actual paying job, besides ‘wizard’, to cover expenses since she was living closer to how humans lived. She required some protection from the dry air, as her magic had been altered, which involved ‘clothing’ (really more of an enchanted blanket to keep her skin moist).

The plot of Melodies of Eternity was as a sequel to Melodies of Life, another game (for which S’reee was not present, but her player was). The premise of MoL was that long ago, the Ancient Herans travelled to the world of Crystallis, and realized the planet was dying, and built machinery to cannibalize other worlds for life energy. This built up a number of cast-off pieces of the worlds which became known as the Calamity. The heroes of MoL stopped the most recent iteration of the cycle (saving their own worlds) and four heroes sacrificed themselves to show the Calamity how to die and be reborn into a new world (S’reee found particular resonance with this story, as it echos the Song of the Twelve). The new world was Vaikuntha. Unfortunately, the lead Heran scientist was being reborn again and again with full memories, was now the Empress of one of the nations of Vaikuntha, and she desired to end her own existence (which meant ending everyone’s existence).

S’reee assumed that due to her duty as a wizard, that was why she was put here. So the time she returned to the space between worlds and was lost (because her mum dropped and re-apped) was a point of frustration and made her determined to complete the task and stop the Empress and her minions. A trip back to Crystallis unveiled that several of the heroes’ homeworlds were compromised by devices from outside given to break them apart to deliberately recreate the Calamity to end the worlds; while S’reee’s own world was unaffected, she got a chance to visit several other worlds (including as a human), before the final battle.

While on the train the last time, S'reee did get a chance to reconnect with some friends from home (Nita and Dairine), which was pleasant because it meant not having to explain too much. It also meant a chance to reconnect with her wizardry, and practice using her shape-changing to try human things. Unfortunately, Nita gave her knew things to worry about, and that's still on her mind. She'll also be trying to catch up on the progress of the train and its passengers in unraveling things and will be relieved that there is some, as well as worried about the state of her body.

Honestly, S’reee’s main take away is that she really wants a vacation after this. Or, if not a vacation, a time when she’s dealing with smaller scale problems and re-establishing her normal life on Earth.

Key themes: Leadership because someone has to do it. Bridging the land and the sea.

Main Motivation: While S’reee jokes about how Nita’s wizardry has invaded her hobbies, S’reee does consider her wizardry her job. That is, helping others and the worlds she lives in, to the best of her abilities. (Granted, she does believe in work-life balance.)

Skills: Let’s start with the mundane skills, then go for magical skills, then the CRAU skills.

S’reee is a whale. She’s a natural at swimming and holding her breath for long period, and knows more about the North Atlantic than most humans because she literally lives in it. Because she is a wizard, she also has an outsider’s view of humanity — they’re a species she’s familiar with, despite not being her own. She usually assumes that she knows more about humans than most humans know about whales. As a wizard, she has an eclectic knowledge base — few whales know much about Mars, but S’reee has been there when assisting friends.

S’reee is a wizard. As mentioned in the world background, S’reee can use Wizard’s Speech. This lets her talk to literally everything (though inanimate objects tend to be less of a focus), and essentially tell the universe to do what she says. The limits here are based on S’reee’s vocabulary in the Speech, her understanding of the problem, and the power outlay.

For the first two, spells require a great deal of specificity to do what you want them to do, especially if you are doing something delicate or prone to blowing up in your face. While many in a wizards normal practice are simple, or take advantage of what normally happens (for instance, healing an injury by speeding up natural healing), a complex spell requires a complex description in the Speech of what is to be done to who and under what circumstances. For the last, small spells can get by with personal energy — you feel tired after their use. The largest workings require more exotic components, like a year of your life or a ‘blank check’ (basically throwing yourself to the Powers that Be and letting Them decide how to get the energy back).

S’reee’s typical use of wizardry is for environmental support — she hovers to travel over land, and keeps air to breathe and water to protect her skin. The times she’s been in fights in canon, she’s used defensive shields (hardening the air/water around her) and post-battle healing, but has physically fought rather than hurl magic about. While many human wizards gained information and spells via a physical device (a book or electronic device), whales hear the information they need as coming from the Sea itself. (This may create problems if S’reee is not regularly visiting large bodies of water.)

One thing S’reee can do that most wizards cannot is because Nita did a serious healing spell on her, one that required Nita’s blood, S’reee’s attempts to shapeshift into a human are much easier than any other form (or for other wizards) — again, she can offset the complex description in the Speech of how human bodies work by directing the spell towards the blood. S’reee is limited in the time she can spend in this form to the better part of the day; trying to keep a whale mind in a human brain means that eventually she might forget how to be a whale and be unable to undo the wizardry.

In Melodies of Eternity, S’reee’s wizardry was suppressed (as were all native powers). The world of Vaikuntha used a system of ‘asterisks’ that contained set skills that slowly unlocked with use, and a computer system (the iMog slate) to change jobs around. S’reee had access to the Illusionist (which focused on illusion, teleportation, and telekinesis) and Red Mage (a mix of elemental magic, healing and physical skills) jobs, as well as a homebrew attempt to adapt her native wizardry into Vaikuntha’s asterisk system by using her own memories and echoes from her world. The last was the difference between a tabletop RPG and a console RPG — instead of an open-ended magical structure, she had a number of choices based on her common options. On the other hand, she could take human form with less risk of ‘going native’ and she’d set it up so her human form would have clothing on the change. Only one set of abilities could be active, but the other two offered some passive element. The full set of abilities is on S’reee’s journal.

Item: The iMog slate she got from Melodies of Eternity, as it is linked to the powers she got there. Manipulating it as a whale is difficult, but do-able, and it does come with a seawater-resistant case.

On the train, she also had a magical 'cloak' that was mostly to keep her skin moist without having to use her own wizardry and a sentimental item of a shell with an engraving (of a translation of the Wizard's Oath) given to her during her prior game.

Sample: S'reee's original TDM thread

A re-app TDM thread

Notes: S’reee is currently small enough to fit into human-sized dwellings, but she still needs to sleep in water.

Her gained power set from Melodies of Eternity is specifically limited to worlds in which that style of powers work; the main advantage is that S’reee has it set up so that she can stay in human form indefinitely, while as a wizard, she has to watch her own mind to make sure she doesn’t ‘forget’ how to be a whale. Given in MoE she couldn’t access her full powers (only emulate some of them within the Job/Asterisk system) while on Vaikuntha, but off-world she was bound to whatever conventions that world had, it’s up to the mods which power set she can keep (or both, or ‘only one set at a time’).