Tag: ned

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More on Margaux

Original image: http://ffffound.com/image/508c657e21642aca5803abf6521b9a672bef4ea3
More Margaux: https://1000days.douglasblaine.com/tag/margaux/
From Jasper: https://1000days.douglasblaine.com/tag/jasper/

Following my hiatus, I’m not ready to go full spontaneous narrative.  This morning I’ll merely speculate spontaneously about Margaux’s role in this growing but unnamed thread.

Possibly I should get a name for it?  Or did I have one and forgot?  Rummaging…nothing definitive.

The artwork of the two inspirational images ties Margaux to Jasper in my mind.  I may have found them around the same time, but I’d have linked the two images regardless as the engender thoughts of a similar theme for me: children of responsibility, earthy human magic, and tainted whimsy.  I saw Margaux as maybe something of a Hermione to Jasper’s Harry–though I’ve only just articulated that thought in those terms just now.  At he very least I saw her in opposition of Ned Who-needs-a-last-name.  As Jasper also opposes Ned that paired the two.

Margaux is tied into a classical oracular magic.  Something a bit more business-like I suppose.  She’s especially skilled at it, but I’m thinking technically anyone the dons the Chronicaller would be able to tap into it’s powers.  Maybe she otherwise possesses a general level of magic like most folks, but in regards to the Chronicaller she’s exceptional.  Seems unlikely that she’d gain access to that helm through typical means.  I’ll need to address how she gets involved in the more adult magic.

Maybe not.  Maybe adults don’t have magic.  Maybe that’s how Jasper ends up writing his fifth and final spell (rather than dying–which is what I thought before).  Still, since Margaux is otherwise typical there would need to be an explanation of her coming into contact with the Chronicaller.

I wonder if she runs around with Jasper or if they merely bump into each other from time to time.  I don’t see this as a team-up situation.  The later seems more likely so I suspect I’ll need a way for them to contact each other over distances.  Cell phones and texting or something my magical?  I like the practical common option the most.  So now I need a reason for Jasper to be out there running around and Margaux not to be.  Could be she’s in a wheel chair or bound by circumstance or geography.

What does Margaux want in all this?  I’m not finding much conflict here.  Maybe she wants to be the best Chronicaller she can be.  She doesn’t much care about what she finds or does, she just wants to be the most precise, the most accurate, the fastest to the answer.  And the Chronicaller gets stolen.  And since her magic is due to evaporate as she becomes an adult they need to get it back to get the best prophecies for the future?

Day 351

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Enter Ned the Goth

One of the things I love about this daily writing work of mine is that when I write myself into a corner as I did yesterday I’m free to just pretend it didn’t happen.  I’m free to do something new today.  Believe me I want to do something new today.

I’ve got no idea why Jasper is hanging out on the fire escape of my real grade school.  I’ve got no idea what spell he is writing, why it’s his last, or why being fifth matters.  At least why it matters enough to mention.

You may recall we first met Jasper in a field conjuring a flock of geometric shapes to aid him in his flight and escape (or transport or casual flying stroll).  I’d written into a corner on that one too.  Jasper escapes; I’m left holding the bag.

Jasper preferred the rune-script for his spells over the verbose Enchanters’ Latin he’d first learned.  The iconic shorthand of vertical strokes and compact loops in singlets, couplets, triplets, or staggered bunches reminded him of musical notes.  He could feel the pattern of the spell in his fingers as he wrote.  It felt much more like he built magic from a scaffold than he merely described it in a book report.  That concrete sensation steadied his hand and informed his artistry.

The the handwritten spell shuddered on the printed gridlines.  He looked to the five in the corner of the page.  The lines snaked out of place in a swirl and then spacked into a spilled-ink shape.  The loops of his rune-script came unwound too.  The verticals withered like new shoots unprotected from the sun.

Without ever looking up, Jasper swiftly closed and bound his Moleskine.  He slipped it under his hoodie into the waist of his jeans at the small of his back.  The pencil he positioned in his fingers so that as he slammed his hand down hard on the metal railing his middle finger cracked the pencil in half across the backs of his other fingers.

“That had to hurt Jasper.  Did it? Did it? Did it?” Ned taunted musically from the asphalt playground below.  Black clouds of soot belched occasionally from below his Demonia boots.  “So sorry to interrupt.  Were you sketching birds again?”

Day 334