From: Nick Stephenson

Hello Luna

I must ask can Arachne make Alex a fate weaver, she is at least as strong as a council white Mage and she spends all her time making things. she must have the power to make one for Alex and he also knows how to stablize it from book one.

Short answer: no. First, I don’t think Arachne could make one – they’re super powerful, created by some weird formula that was lost centuries ago, using a magic type that isn’t hers. She can make a lot of stuff, but that doesn’t mean she can make anything.

Second, Alex doesn’t actually know how to stabilise one as far as I know. The one guy we know of who did manage to stabilise one did it through being a mind mage, and asking him for the details of how he did it is not exactly an option.

From: Bruce Donohue

Hello Luna,

Hope all is well with you. Can you tell us a little bit of what went on with you while Alex and Anne were world hopping to avoid being caught and killed? Have Alex and Anne sat down with you and Sonder to explain the consequences of having to work with Morden and Richard and the full ramifications of how they both ended being in their employment and what being the ‘Liaison’ and Alex being a full status member Keeper mean?

In regards to shifters, always viewed that as being like a natural born condition like part of the DNA makeup, does that mean that shifters can also be or possess other type of magic or they can only be shifters? Of all the types of magic type that one can possess which one has the most wide/broad range of skills and abilities? Has it ever happened that naturally a mage has more than one type of magic example fire/energy/air and access to draw on all of them equally? Is their such a thing as a generalist mage where they can draw on any sphere/type of magic, only limit is the capacity to learn it?

You got your money’s worth out of that email bandwidth, didn’t you?

Yes, I can say a bit about what happened while Alex and Anne were off country hopping; no, I don’t want to. Let’s just say it wasn’t fun. We’ve had a bunch of discussions since then, and things are a little better, but I did not have a good January that year.

Shapeshift magic is a specific type of magic – have no idea whether it’s genetic, but it’s not an ‘extra’ on top of other abilities. You can have hybrids, but from what I understand shifters are LESS likely to be hybrids than other mage types, because shapeshifting is so crazy difficult that you really need to focus on it to do it well. It’s not like air magic where if you mess up, you make a whirlwind or something. If you mess up a shapeshift, you can have some really really unpleasant things happen to you – think about what happens if you’re trying to transplant your mind into a different-sized creature’s brain and get it wrong.

There aren’t really any ‘generalist’ mages in the sense that you’re asking for similar reasons. Magic is hard. Trying to be a high-level fire mage and air mage and force mage at the same time would be like trying to be a world-class mountain climber and a Nobel-prize-winning professor and an internationally famous musician all at once. I guess it’s possible, but where are you going to find the time? It’s not like some kind of gift where you just get handed your abilities and that’s it, you’re superhuman now, go have fun. The master mages have been training up and practising their spells for decades.

From: Xexas

Luna

When u give your curse to someone else temporarily, have you tried reversing it so that they attract all kinds of bad luck

Uh, that’s literally what happens whenever I touch someone. I don’t need to try to give someone bad luck. The hard part is not giving them bad luck.

From: Willow

Hey, Luna,

I was thinking about Chance magic and how it all worked for you. The way I understand, you can use your curse to make random bad things happen to people, but could you, or can you, decide what exactly it is that is happening to them? Could a chance mage?

Now that’s an interesting one. The answer is yes . . . but it’s difficult, and you need really fine control. Practising on people is a bad idea for obvious reasons, but I’ve spent a lot of time trying it on objects . . . the idea is that you deliver the effect, but then you try to ‘nudge’ it so that it goes in a certain direction. The trouble is that it keeps trying to follow the path of least resistance, which isn’t always the path you want, so keeping it there can be a real struggle. It’s actually one of the main things Chalice has been trying to teach me, and I’m a lot further along than I used to be, but I still haven’t mastered it.