Tag: worldbuilding

Oh shoot I think the part of my ask got cut off cause it was too long haha.

I couldn’t find the summary and bios cause I’m n my phone, lol.

My question was how do demons aquire a flock? Are dreams/nightmares limited to demons that deal with those types of things or can any sufficiently powerful demon have one? How and why would a nightmare come into service (is that the right word?) To a young demon growing in power? Is it of their own volition or are they kind of snagged by the demon’s power as they go by?

Nightmares are simply attracted to (though not snagged by) demons’ power in the Mindscape. A Nightmare out on its own is basically a wandering potential snack for anything that might happen by, and this may very well include other Nightmares. It is formless and relatively weak.

But once a Nightmare has attached itself to a demon, it gains a stable form (the exact shape of which is dependent upon the demon itself) and thereby usually some better means of self-defense, as well as a relatively safe place to stay and a little more power, as attached Nightmares get to feed off of a demon’s surplus. In exchange, the Nightmares act as servants, sycophants, and, in extremis, occasional snacks for the demon.

It’s only relatively safe, not completely.

They enter this service of their own volition. Technically a Nightmare could choose to remain independent. These don’t tend to last as long as the ones who have joined a demon’s ranks, even with the snacking thing taken into account.

Each demon can also only support/keep so many Nightmares, as determined by their power. There’s basically a capacity limit in each little bubbled realm of dreamspace. Nightmares can typically sense whether there’s room for them or not. There’s not generally much of an application process. Typically they just slide in and assimilate, and most demons don’t really care about them as individuals.

So to Nightmares, a new young demon in the mindscape without a following…

…more or less.

As for Dreams, overall they’re the ultimate prey in this environment and don’t attach to demons as a general rule, mostly because they’d be eaten immediately, either by said demon or by the Nightmares under said demon’s command.

Alcor’s pretty much a weirdo all around in this aspect, as he is in so many others.

ok my brain just made this connection Halloween is based on the Celtic feast of Samhain. In Samhain costumes and Jack-o-lanterns (originally turnips) are about protection from evil sprite as the vail between world is weak. So post Transcendence would Halloween costumes become mandatory like it’s literally not safe of leave the house on Halloween without one?

Perhaps not in all places, but yes, Halloween definitely gets more… lively after the transcendence

-Dreams that take 2D form, like crayon scribbles on the walls that follow you around. 

-A small little pack of Daymares that likes to party in high stress environments like talent shows or state testing centers, but they’re easily distracted. They sound like the incessant clicking of pens, speak in spliced-apart echo repetition, and generally can only be seen in your peripheral. 

-Small fluffy rabbit Dreams that huddle and multiply in preschools or daycares. 

-Lonely abandoned Dreams, grey and drab like old laundry. 

-Fledgling Nightmares that try to be all of the scary things and end up looking more bizarrely cute than terrifying. Please don’t laugh at them, they try so hard. Not their fault if a fear of falling combines with a fear of drowning, resulting in manifestation as a leaky ceiling.

I was suddenly struck by a flood of ideas. Thoughts?

After the transcendence (is that how you call it-) would yokai also become more common, for example a kitsune or kamaitachi accidentally get lost and wind up in gravity falls and end up bringing some more? Im sorry im a huge nerd and I’d love that idea (Also need to draw alcor as a tengu or oni and mabel as a nekomata)

Yokai could certainly arrive along with the rest of their mythological brethren! Shinto-esque gods are already very much a thing.

No one changes into monsters in this AU though (not as a rule, anyway) – for that you’re looking for the AU Monster Falls!

Why isn’t summoning demons illegal? It should be an enforced rule. Summoning a demon should be one of the worst crimes one could commit, second only to murder. The fact that anyone is actually dumb enough to summon one in the first place is beyond me. Even before the transcendence, ppl said not to mess with demons. Now suddenly ppl are summoning demons, why is this legal?! Are these guys really that dumb or are there hundreds of ppl (kids too) breaking the law everyday now?

smallricochet:

transcendence-au:

It actually is very illegal! A fic or two touched on that back when this AU first started; though whether or not people have kept this in mind is… debatable. Not that I’m upset or anything, ‘cause hey, fandoms do what they wanna do.

Only a few years after the Transcendence was summoning made illegal. Another few years after that, an addendum was made to allow certain kinds of summoning involving more harmless forms of magical creatures under certain circumstances (usually involving a license), but demons were still a straight up aw hell no. That shit’s dangerous, no exceptions.

The punishment for such crime was never discussed, however. You’d probably look at a probation of some kind, and a decent amount of time in the slammer, depending on the case.

It still fits that out of the billions of people in the world, there would be some people who just wouldn’t think much about it. Cassie, as an example, was really too young to grasp that she was doing anything that dangerous or that she’d get in deep trouble for it. You’re always going to have a sizable amount of people who either don’t care (either through desperation, revenge, or what have you), or don’t really comprehend.

Department of Health and Human Services (currently second most funded in the US next to Department of Homeland Security and responsible for medicaid/medicare and the fda for example) would have to make new agencies to cover new healthcare violations such as but not limited to: magical poisoning, standardized food safety regulations of magical exposure depending on effects, demon summonings, curse breaking. Department of Homeland security might have to make new agencies also on demon summoning, ward building, etc. Not as knowledgeable on DHS as DHHS. 

Presuming demon summonings are not common, interaction with supernatural creatures is very common, and magic/spells/summoning is accessible to people.

Probably these revisions would be more regulatory based than statute based, because of circumstances of magical discovery specifics would have to be limited to private law because it’s so professional (to a few certified) based, which means lots of hastily officiated boards for regulating this sort of activity. That means a bunch of “professional” amateurs form the basis of law for the future due to crisis like circumstances.

Are there schools for magic? Magically enhanced children, new races going to school with, magical sports? I guess everyone can use magic now so there’s probably a class dedicated to it. Could replace home ec.

For demon summonings in particular, there would be both civil and criminal penalties- probably first under the assumption all demon summonings are dangerous and harmful, akin to a raging (magically buffed) beast and more dangerous than a bomb, and do not include summoning spells in general.

The other thing I can think of is in criminal law there’s an element called mens rea, and since illusions, mind control, possession, and soul-threatening duress are now possibly common things that happen to people accidentally or as a result or predicated by demon summonings or fairy kidnappings or mysterious disappearances and things like that, “the devil made me do it” or “god told me to do it” might have to find new ways to grapple with for incarceration or death penalty or …….. sealing…. for a non human entity or corrupted soul????

Jails would have to be warded, tattoos would have to be lazered off.

Civil sanctions…. for example) are going to be lack of access to medicaid/medicare if you use magic to falsely claim you’re sick lol. Or lack of covered curse breaking from curse breaking section of medicare if you try to defraud the gov of money with your shiny new curse breaking and magical maladies hospital. Money based. There would be a lot of these! Fraud would absolutely be rampant, people getting conned and lied to everywhere until laws catch up. (Maybe technology or auditing methods would be greatly benefitted by a whole advanced kind of magic, a lot faster.) 

Man privacy laws are having trouble just with technology, gps, and the internet, imagine of magic (magically enhanced hearing, xray vision, soul reading, psychometry, telekinesis, always knowing if someone is lying etc) would wreak havoc on privacy laws and police investigation.

Maybe due to people being fearful and not adapting fast enough magical beings would end up forming their own kind of psuedo peace keeping forces who would later be inducted or melded with police force at a later date and subject to respecting human rights laws…. and I guess whatever else isn’t human lmao. Whole new set of laws. That would be an interesting story- werewolf peace keeping force. 

Criminal sanctions: based on lifespan for non humans or affected humans? Just for humans summoning a demon illegally, probably demons would be considered dangerous enough to be under strict liability, meaning if you did it, you’re guilty, no factor by factor analysis like foreknowledge, how dangerous the entity was, the damage/effect demon ended up having. Besides fines and sanctions, up to 5 years in prison for harmless things, like… little flighty fairies? and maybe to life for anything above a certain threshold. Defense may be coercion. Regularly scheduled purifying rituals and truth telling bits for infected souls. 

I’d assume magic would cause more problems then it would conveniently put new products into the economy so there would probably be some kind of minor depression market crash, and people would be more scared and spend less.

For fic fun stories about a criminal who summoned a demon: after barely avoiding a life sentence, assigned to a barely just made legal board of magical beings who dole out your probation, not entirely professional yet but maybe trying to be fair while not knowing everything about the situation, forced to attend cleansings weekly but since the understanding isn’t right the curse keeps coming back, but sealed by fae to keep your mouth shut. 

So many possible factors, though. The stories where the law is built out of sordid unjust experience of a few are always the most insane.

far future assumption: demon summoning as integrated enough into society and not soley in situations that end up with a soul gone or people injured may relax legal standards in cases of…………………. I don’t know. what would you use demons for? bodyguards? enslaved magic? Like bartimeous trilogy?

recently I saw some picture’s of what biblical angels look like and a suspect that as little as their mention this is more like what TAU angles are multiple Wing Faces and not even a little human looking kind of terrifying if you think about it

Angels can vary in appearance as much as demons can!

Though most Angels find it worthwhile spending more time and energy into altering their form to look as benevolent as possible to garner favor from humans. It’s not an inherent talent though, so some Angels aren’t too good at it, or have trouble keeping up appearances for a variety of reasons (low energy, magical storms, afflictions, little transforming talent, etc).

HC the reason that the worlds governments aren’t constantly being toppled is the no person or cult can realistically gather a sacrifice big enough for world domination. You could theoretically make a number of smaller sacrifices to reach this goal but the demon always gets bored and usually eats you before you reach that point. There is one exception but most people agree that Super-Amazing-Ultra-Unstoppable-Magnificent-Empress-Mizar doesn’t count.

.

A spell is invented that allows humans to remember one previous life (one and only one the human mind can barely handle that much and adding more end very badly. One of the reasons is why it’s eventually band and forgotten about) in order to chose you most focus on a year in the past to make sure you only get one life time. Naturally a lot of people pick the year of the Transcendence out of curiously. Dipper enjoys this a lot he gets some of his friend and family back and people get his jokes

Okay, okay, so a couple of us mods talked about this and we’ve expanded on it and it’s got so much potential, so here’s some more thoughts:

– Another limitation to this spell is that the memories don’t necessarily all come flooding back, nor can they all be perfectly recalled in chronological order. Oh, maybe it does for some, which is uncomfortable at best and maddening at worst, but for most it’s more like…childhood nostalgia, in a weird way. You remember things almost randomly, or in connection with other things. It’s not exactly controllable, and can often be confusing because you might remember the effect of something but not the cause. (i.e. ‘Wait, why did my past life hate peanut butter? I don’t get it.’)

– Some spellcrafters tried to work this ‘bug’ out and make it easier to control, more complete or whatever, but this tended to just make things worse. Some people got hospitalized due to mental damages caused by the spell. So yeah, in certain areas it is definitely banned, because while not everybody suffered a bad reaction to it, enough did that it couldn’t be considered generally safe. You can still get it on the black market in these areas if you really, really want to…but it’s a hell of a gamble for curiosity’s sake alone.

– ALSO, also, the vast majority of people? They want to know that they were someone important once. Everybody wants to be a reincarnation of, oh I don’t know, a president or a king or a movie star or the like. Nobody wants to pay for this spell just to end up with memories of a mundane life with a 9 to 5 job and a mortgage and paying for life insurance, where the most exciting thing that ever happened was when you took horseback riding lessons that one time and fell off right into a cactus. Dissatisfaction alone could account for both how quickly this spell fell from popular use and potentially also for the major problems caused by ‘overdosing’ as people go back for a second try, so to speak.

– Also, Transcendence era? That’s going to include a huge span of lifetimes. Someone could go ‘who was I when I lived at this time’ only to find out that, for instance, the vast majority of that life passed before the Transcendence even happened – that they were ninety and in a nursing home by that summer, and their days in that historic period were filled with TV reruns and Bingo games and the fact that they really liked rice pudding because they could eat it without dentures. Fairies and dragons and goblins are real, you say? That’s nice, son. Where’s my pudding?

– On the other hand, someone who picked a different time for whatever reason: “I think…at one point…Alcor was my teacher.” “Okay Edgelord McGaryStu.” “No. No I’m serious.” And they’re forever haunted by this because they just can’t remember why this might have been, and they can’t make sense of it at all, just that apparently a past life took a demonology course in university and apparently on the last day of that course this was revealed and it’s all weird impressions and stuff and they don’t think they ever saw the demon again, so just, why???

And finally:

How hard is it for a human to force there way into the mindscape? Like lucid dreaming and going way to deep.

Almost impossibly hard, especially if it has nothing specific it’s aiming for on the other side (i.e. a young Bentley’s accidental foray into Alcor’s mindscape, made possible largely if not almost entirely because of the soul-deep bond between them).

Note the word ‘almost,’ though, because the universe does occasionally tend to surprise, and rare exceptions do happen from time to scattered time.

And, of course, while it is rare indeed for such an exception to come along, it’s even more rare for said exception to leave again, whole and unmarred, because the mindscape is vast, and it can be maddening beyond mortal comprehension, and it is filled with all sorts of…unfriendly…entities.

Unfriendly entities that may regard a wandering mortal consciousness in their domain as something like a chew toy, at best.