This is kind of a weird page, in that Sydney asks a question and it doesn’t quite get answered on this page, but some of you can probably see what Ingsol is winding up to. I found the aside with the spells as programs too enticing to edit out.

In a post computer world, it’s difficult to not think of spells as nothing more than code. Really I guess that’s what they are, but you don’t often hear people talking about “My fire dart spell is almost ready, but it kept crashing at this function loop. I found a Yoda condition and fixed it, but now it hangs and just bleeds heat until I cancel the spell or run out of mana.”

Magic would probably have different enchanting languages depending on your school of magic at least. Actually it would be a mess because every branch of magic would probably have variants on common enchanting languages, and proper enchanting , that is, imbuing an artifact with magical properties would probably take a different language than casting a quick spell, vs. an extended ceremony designed to conjure something. Or maybe there’s one language which does it all, but not as efficiently as single purpose languages, and there would probably be forums where people are shitty and defensive about their favorite language, or where they share moronically written enchantments their co-workers wrote, just like in real life.

I like “Arcanum++” because it’s so on the nose and answers Sydney’s question without ever saying it directly. Even if you’ve never done any programming on your life you’ve probably heard of C++.

There was some debate in the comments from the previous page as to whether all these creatures hiding in plain sight meant something untoward was going on. (Sorry I didn’t getting around to throwing my two cents in with the comments, but I was weirdly busy with stuff last week so I’ll put something here.) Obviously, there’s a case to be made since 1) someone could be making out with a lizardman at a club (for example) and not know it, which is… I guess bad, if you’re racist against lizardmen, but if there’s no detrimental consequence to making out with one, like some kind of flu you can only get from sticking your tongue in their mouth, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. Obviously your mileage will vary with that one. I think as long as someone is honest about who they are, it doesn’t really matter what they are? I end that sentence with a question mark because I imagine I could think of examples where that’s not true if I gave it some more thought.

“I’m sorry, I’ve been lying this whole time, I’m not brunette, I’m really a… blonde!”

“You monster why would you lie to me!?”

2) And this is the big one really, some of these creatures do prey on humans. That said, the ones that do generally try not to kill or otherwise traumatize them. Most Vampires are just fine with willing victims, and there are small pockets of people who do know about them, (much fewer than know everything). Obviously as with any population like this, there are going to be some who are going to delight in tormenting or killing their prey, but as Ingsol said, they police their own. Keeping their more rampant members in check allows them to work in good faith with the government

Since I don’t plan on dissecting every aspect of The Veil in the comic, I’ll expand a little on it here. It doesn’t alter memories. If someone sees something in the raw, they either have to rationalize it, go running through the streets trying to tell everyone, (usually winding up in therapy,) or become one of those quiet wierdos who insists they saw a centaur at the corner of 5th and main and finds some private message board where he can commiserate with the other people like him. Often times those boards and UFO Cons or whatever are infiltrated by Council people who try and subtly steer people back to “rationality.” (Oh you’re a new vampire are you? How many words per minute can you type?) It’s not an easy job, but the Council has a number of playbooks on that kind of disinformation campaign.

The Veil allows the supernatural to exist along side humans without them noticing. Mostly it does this by making non-humans look human. It also does stuff like alter how humans see certain footprints and other telltale signs. It’s not foolproof, and stuff like a supernatural leaving their blood all over a crime scene can be quite a complication. The most recent and complicated additions to The Veil are things like altering how photographs and video recordings appear. Sydney will be disappointed when she checks the pictures she took earlier.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon as soon as I get up. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.