Summer Camp Prep 2025

Creatures of Faerie play a major role in Betwixt and Between, and they take nourishment from the emotional energy of mortals.  This isn't always harmful to the mortal it is being taken from, but it can be.  Examples of this type of nourishment in the series include:

• Mewse, who either help a creative mortal focus their energy in return for receiving a little bit of the excess energy generated, or partner with a mortal mage or warrior, protect and advise them, and use the mortals' love and affection to nourish their magic. Mage partners often actively choose to feed their energy to their Mewse.
• Sidhe use mortal emotion to fuel their magic.  While the Seelie Court focuses on more positive emotions such as joy, affection, creativity, the Unseelie court focus on more negative ones like pain, fear, and despair. 
• Carys, the half-unseelie sidhe main character, will eventually be able to help other characters heal mentally from traumatic events, taking some of the emotional energy associated with the traumatic memories, allowing the traumatized person to process the memories without being overwhelmed by the strength of their own emotions regarding them.
• Seelie sidhe often romance a mortal to nourish themselves on the energy generated by the romantic and lustful emotions created in the mortal.
• Unseelie Sidhe often do the same, but the end result is generally less pleasant then a broken heart.  Many a mortal has been kidnapped underhill to live as a slave, tortured whenever their owner wants to get energy from their pain.

There are other kinds of unusual nourishment in the world of Betwixt and Between as well.  Many shape shifters have ties to the moon or sun and require exposure to the light of one or the other to shift.  Cat shifters often like to bask in the light of the sun and absorb its energy for later use.  They get tempermental if those energy reserves get too low.  Vampires exist, of many types, the more traditional kind feeding on blood, others feeding directly on the life energy of their victims.  

The Oroboros Libraries provide nourishment of a more indirect sort.  They nourish a sense of community among all those who know about the existence of the supernatural, by providing a neutral ground where peaceful interaction is enforced, so that people can hold gatherings and meet friends from outside their specific factions.  The librarians nourish peace, because the factions know that they have a recourse if a member of another faction is causing problems for them, and that if they take it to the librarians, it will be handled in a way that does not start a war between the two factions.  They nourish justice by policing the use of magic against others, and ensuring that injustices committed against those without magic do not go unaddressed.

The main and main adjacent characters are able to meet their material and physical needs at the beginning of the first novel, but their attempts to fill more abstract needs are what fuels the story. For example:

• - Carys Jones, the main character, has a deep seated need to find both a sense of her identity as an individual,and a community where she doesn't have to hide who and what she is from everyone. She is searching to find out the truth of her parentage, and she desperately needs control over her inherent magical ability to use her own magic.
• Tytus Anderson, the newly appointed Director of the newly reopened Lockport Branch of the Oroboros Libraries, has a strong need to prove, to himself as well as his family, he is not a failure.
• Alec Emerson needs to find healing from childhood traumas and the belief that he is somehow tainted by his family's history.

I have a lot of work to do on the World Meta. I basically had only the first section filled out. Things I needed to consider my answers to:

• How Does the World Feel? : The world of Betwixt and Between should feel comfortable and everyday, but with the sense that the mysterious and fantastical are never as far away as you think they are.
• What is the Character Agency Like: For some reason, this is a very dificult one for me to answer, and it may take some thought. I think part of the problem is that I tend to see it from the character's perspectives, and at the beginning of the series, they don't feel that they have any greater ability to change the world then anyone else. That is somewhat true, but as the series progresses they will have to make choices that will have a lasting and profound effect not just on the mortal realm as a whole, but the faerie realm as well.
• What is the tone of your world?: Overall, much like ours, it is up to individuals to make choices out of a desire to have the world be a bright place, or to act out of a belief that only their needs matter because the world is a dark place and if they don't take care of themselves no one will, to determine the brightness or darkness any given situation.
• What are the recurring themes which reinforce the genre, tone and feel of your world?:
  1. Re-occurring theme of characters struggling to fulfill, and questioning, the expectations that are imposed upon them by society, culture, or family
  2. Things not being as simple as they appear on the surface
  3. Characters having to choose from options, none of which are good, often between risk to life and limb and risk to soul and spirit.
• Scene- All the questions have now been answered.
• People: I have decided to leave this one empty for now, making up the magical and supernatural peoples and cultures is part of what I want to work on for summer camp this year.
• Drama Points: These have been added.

The article for the Ordo Venatorum de Magicis Malignis needs to be updated and completed, however this article is going to take way more than a week's worth of work, and posibly more than a month's, since I also want to do the rest of the prep for Summer Camp. The Mewse article needs a little bit of work which will require research into the biology and so forth of actual cats is as a basis, so that again may wait until after summer camp. The Lockport Branch of the Oroboros Library article needs to be completed., but again, that is going to take some thought, and will probably take more time then I have before summer camp.

The main area I will be focusing on is Lockport and the area around it, in both the mortal realm and in faerie. Due to metaphysical geography the area is somewhat isolated magically, often not effected by magical patterns and energy spikes in the areas around it. The magical cultures in the area tend towards self sufficiency, having little contact with any world wide or even nationwide communities. This means that they are likely to see the return of the Oroboros Library as unnecessary outside interference, and regard the Librarians with suspicion at best. The historical persecution many magical communities faced has left a strong tendency towards secrecy and distrust of outsiders.

The non-magical culture of the area was heavily shaped by the canal boom, and the subsequent depression when the income created by bein the port city at the locks dried up. Heavy industry at one point had moved in to fill the void, but as more and more companies moved their manufacturing overseas, that dried up too. There are many mansions from the late eighteenth century that have been divided up and made into apartment buildings in the main part of the city. Nowadays, the affluent are live in the more rural town of Lockport which surrounds the city on three sides.

I am going to focus on transformations and adaptations individual characters have gone and will go through. I will focus on Carys Jones, Ty Anderson, and Alec Emerson, because they are the characters I know the most about. I will place anything will happen after the early part of the fist book in spoilers.

Carys Jones

• As a half-sidhe, Carys will go through a number of magical awakenings as she matures in age. For half-sidhe, the first of these awakenings occurs on the Beltane or Samhain after their seventh birthday, and the second is usually on the same change of season sabbat after their twenty first birthday, a third after their forty-second birthday, etc. Carys does not remember her first awakening, and shortly after it occurred, her magic was bound, but she is rapidly approaching the second one. These awakenings increase the strength of magical senses, and the amount of energy which a half-sidhe can draw upon to fuel their magic.
• Although she did go to college, and lived on campus, Carys has permanently moved out of her mother's home, and is truly on her own for the first time in her life. She has to adapt to bein responsible only to herself for her decisions regarding her life.
• Show spoiler

  Although it may not happen in the first book, Carys will eventually start questioning her gender identity. She, or they, will find transition easier, in some ways, as Sidhe can change there gender expression, with a bit of magical effort.

Tytus Anderson

• Tytus is having to adjust to living in a small city, rather then a large metropolis. His family home was not far from New York City when he was growing up, and his last assignment was as a Custos Populorum in the Washington, D.C. branch of the Oroboros Library, so living in a city where the sidewalks roll up and nothing is open after 10pm is very strange for him.
• Tytus has always had a tendency rebel against authority. Now, as the Director of the Lockport Branch, he is, at least regionally, the authority. Learning to delegate appropriately is something he struggles with.

Alec Emerson

• Alec's birth family were blood mages, although they hid this well. Alec went to the Ordo Venatorum for help as a not quite teenager when his father tried to force him to join the family tradition. The order dealt with his family, many of whom were executed. Alec was taken in by the Ordo Venatorum, and taught to use his gift for magic ethically. Needless to say, Alec sometimes struggles with PTSD, particularly when it comes to trusting others. He has had to adapt to not living in constant fear.

On the recomendation of Sable Aradia, I am reading "Master and Commander" by Patrick O'Brian. It is historical military fiction, a genre I haven't really explored extensively, and an author I have never read.

However, as I doubt I will finish it in time for the start of Summer Camp, so I have decided to focus on some of my more recently read novels to discuss what I learned from them, and what inspired me.

The last thing I finished reading was "Dragonflight" by Anne McCaffrey. For those unfamiliar with the work, the basic premise is that a colony of a future, spacefaring version of human civilization was sent to a planet called Pern. They were well-settled, and had canbalized their ships to build other things, when a major complication arose. The Red Star, a wandering planet that had been captured by the star with a very eccentric orbit, began to orbit close enough to Pern that on each pass, it's native life form, an fungal thread like non-sentient life form that devoured all organic material it ran into once it was on Pern, tried to jump across the gap between planets. The colonists had begun to loose contact with their originating civilization, and in the chaos of the destructive thread falling from the sky, they lost it completely. They eventually had the idea to breed small flying fire breathing lizards up to a size to be able to carry a human rider, and used those too flame out the thread as it came down.

That's the prologue. The actual story part of the book reads more like fantasy that science fiction, as it takes place many hundreds, possibly many thousands of years later, when the society had devolved to a medieval level of tech and a feudal culture. The main story starts at a time when the red star, due to the eccentricity of it's orbit hasn't made a pass close enough for the thread to fall in almost four hundred years, and most have stopped believing that it ever will again. There are only a small number of dragons left, and the main characters struggle to prepare for the coming thread, when very few believe it is actually coming again, despite astronomical indicators that it will fall very soon. Once it begins to fall, they realize they don't have enough dragons to protect the continent which has been settled, and I will not spoil how they solve that problem.

The thing that really inspired me about this work is that while it reads like fantasy, the basic concepts behind it are very much science fiction. I majored in the theoretical side of Mathematics in collage, and a lot of of the advanced constructions of set theory and mathematical logic made me think of ways they could be described poetically using language that is cliche'd by fairy tales. For example, there are different sizes of infinite sets, and one of the ways of dealing with stating the sizes of sets that are bigger then the natural numbers is basically Infinity+1, or Infinity *Infinity. (If I'm explaining this poorly, it has been almost twenty years since I took the class...) In that context, Forever and a day, might have a bit more meaning.

What I learned from this work is that I don't have explain the details of how everything works directly in the book as it occurs. The gist, or that it does work, is enough, and too much might distract from the actual story.

• The Radient Masque

  This article had just enough detail to give me a mental image of what the masque was like, and pique my instrest, without getting bogged down in specific events that had happened at specific masques in the past. The discusion of the Church of Hope's issue with the mask reminded added a sense that not everything is good and emphasized that the masque is more than simply a happy holiday, it is a remembrance of all those who fought to be themselves openly and a celebration of those who are still fighting.

• Broken Things and Stardust This article reminded me that not all articles have to be long to be powerful.
• Archfactor Quintus Potanius

  This article is well written, and once again reminds me that not getting too lost in nailing down the exact details of every possible thing related to the articles topic is not necessary for a good article. It also shows that while images can enhance an article, they are not always absolutely necessary.