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bladengineer · 4 years

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Bladebreakers: College Edition

anyone who’s already read my fics knows exactly what i’m about, so lets get straight to business about the college headcanons im about to slap yall with

also all under the cut bc this went way too long lmfao Hilary and Kenny should follow shortly bc it got really long and im just. oops

Kai is the first to go which is like. logical considering he’s the oldest and most driven out of all of them

not to mention he had the entirety of Hiwatari Corp. about to be put into his name as soon as he reached 18 and he’s just like aw man here we go

to be honest? he’s not keen on taking over the company, never has been (excluding the time where he felt obligated to under his grandfather’s influence) and the thought of actually having too just kinda. embitters him

so he gets himself sucked into the whole Business classes to get himself the necessary qualifications – and despite being bitter, he doesn’t half-ass shit so he studies on the regular

it isn't until Max wrangles him into finally giving his own interests a go and he changes his path to a History Major with a Minor in Business

he is so much happier

History, specifically Ancient History, had always been an avid interest in Kai’s books so he basically dives into his new studies with his own brand of stoic enthusiasm

its also the sole reason why he’s been amassing so many books in his personal collection at home, Hilary had implored him to buy bigger shelves after Max nearly broke his neck tripping over a loose pile

Kai likes to study alone, preferably in his private study (Tyson keeps making fun of him for having a private study at the age of 18, what are you, a grandpa? damn rich kid lmao) with soft instrumental music playing – he’s especially fond of rainy ambience music

of course, Kai is often seated at the back of the classes, but is indisputably one of the best students with very insightful and well-researched essays, naturally, most of his professors adore him

except a select few traditional-minded professors – they’re still bitter that Kai stood his ground when they had overlooked Cleopatra’s history and reduced her to the Ancient Sex Symbol and Kai was ready to cut a bitch at the blatant disrespect towards an Ancient Political Mastermind

the majority in his class has a fat crush on him but thats nothing new

Max, for a long time, had a bit of a dilemma as his parents urge him to start choosing his preferred path; was it going to be Engineering like his Mother or Mechanics like his Father, and honestly? the poor boy was so torn

in the end, he confessed he wanted to do neither – he loved Beyblade but it wasn’t something he wanted to dedicate his life to forever

instead, his heart had always belonged to the ocean and he dreams of being a Marine Biologist

his father was very supportive, while Judy had her doubts so it took a little convincing – in the end, her son’s joy was more important to her and she too gave her blessing for him to pursue his dream

Max goes on to major Zoology, directed towards marine animals, and takes up a minor in Engineering because hey, it pretty much runs in his family and it stayed an avid interest of his

his university wasn’t too far of from Kai’s own, so sometimes when he stays over at Kai’s he gets a free ride to class

he returns the gesture by always providing the best butter croissants for breakfast (they’re still warm too!)

Max usually studies in the campus library, noise-cancelling headphones on, bopping silently to whatever music he’s listening to as he reviews his notes for the next exam

he researches a lot for his topics and has collected so much trivia about the ocean and its inhabitants in general

Max: did you know jellyfishes have no brain? Kai: Max don’t bully Tyson Tyson: excuse me?

the professors love Max tbh, he’s always fully engaged within class so they usually let him get away with things mainly bc he’s just their Favourite

pretty sure half of the university knows of Max in some way or another, being a social butterfly and all and maybe having flooded the campus once by accident

Ray also had a hard time deciding what to do and what to study; being from a rural village with traditions certainly made him question wether he should pursue a modern career or stay within his community

the White Tigers were quick to kick his ass over it however, booting him straight to Kai’s doorstep and telling him to do what he feels was right for him

now, he’s managed to get himself applied to one of the prestigious university for culinary arts – he’s not too sure yet which path he wants to take in terms of culinary skill

he loves cooking and working in a kitchen, however after many work experiences he has found that working at the command of someone else wasn't exactly to his tastes, not to mention, he’d like to dabble in more traditional culinary arts

as of now, Ray particularly enjoys the sweeter side of cooking, preferring to create intricate pastries and confectionaries, often stemming from his chinese roots but also applying his skill within the japanese side of things

his homemade mooncakes are honestly to die for

next to his obvious passion for cooking, he’s also taken up classes in horticulture, mainly bc he’d love to grow his own ingredients and create his own sets of spices and various artisan products

since his career path is very labour focused, he often practices at home and takes inspiration from various chefs all around the world. his bookshelves are full of recipe books and general insightful cookbooks

Max had suggested to him to make videos of his dishes, mainly for self-improvement, but also being able to put them online to start a crowd interest for his work

its going pretty well actually, his videos have become quite popular since they are aesthetically pleasing, the food looks tasty as hell and also a wide crowd of older people have voiced their joy in seeing more traditional confectionary being made

his friends secretly love their birthdays nowadays bc without fail, Ray always gifts them homemade foods, from neat boxes of handcrafted chocolates to cute jars of sweet jams

he knows, he always takes time to create flavours he knows they will appreciate

Tyson, surprisingly, knew exactly what he wanted to do, and it wasn’t anything to do with Beyblade

Hilary: WHAT ARE YOU SICK Tyson: i- no? i just– Ray: hold on maybe he’s running a fever Tyson: would yOU GUYS JUST LISTEN–

look, he loves Beyblade, it’s something he’ll treasure all his life, something he’ll still pursue in the future, but

it won’t be what he wants to do full time

instead, he majors in Anthropology in order to pave his way into Archeology and everyone is so proud they start crying

next to his Major, he also minors in Business, mainly due to his longstanding position within the BBA, with whom he stays as a particular poster boy and star

next to his work with the BBA, he occasionally helps out in the Dojo and everyone kinda realises? that this guy is literally holding down two (2) whole jobs while also studying and if that isn't hardcore my dudes i don’t know

then again, he’s grown a lot and his interest in his father’s career had always accompanied him since he was a kid – however, his studying habits are still all kinds of atrocious and the only reason why he can even halfway ace his exams is bc he refuses to go down quietly, actually is really critical and analytical is he puts his head into it, and the fact that he employs Hilary to stand vigil with a rolled up magazine to smack him back into focus should he slack off

otherwise, he’s friends with most people in his class and regularly exchanges notes with them and even has become a favourite with a select few of his professors

most just find him exhausting but can’t refute his elaborate essays, which are both thoughtful as eyebrow raising

he attends the same university as Kai (much to his chagrin) and they stick together just as much as they bicker (one-sidedly) just like old times – however, they are both ancient history buffs and its one of the very few topics that they can be heard talking about in actual peace without Tyson going apeshit when Kai loses interest in the conversation

Tyson and Kai are also those college students who pull ridiculous all nighters to study

Max once got so nervous for an exam he made a terrifying concoction of Red Bull and Instant Coffee to stay up and study

he aced the exam but he cannot for the life of him remember what he did in those 24hours bc as soon as he went home he crashed for nearly 32hours straight

Tyson and Ray who were present at the time refuse to speak about it and when asked about it, they kinda just. disassociate for a minute at the sheer horror they had witnessed

Kai rarely ever communicates with classmates yet somehow gets always invited to all the frat parties

who are those people? he doesn’t know

#beyblade #bakuten shoot beyblade #beyblade headcanon #engineering some headcanons #bladebreakers #i low-key love those college aus only bc the amount of shenanigans they could get into #actually i should make a more extensive list about their shenanigans #bc this was literally halfway a meta about my own deductions of the characters #HM.

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whetstonefires · 4 years

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"the top three of its forty floors are filled with brass telescopes of every size, pointing in every possible direction, including several that do not exist within the normal three dimensions of space." thats SUCH a cool image / "If any harvest will come." ooh i wonder whats going on / "The roofs are of red tile, the stucco of the houses painted in shades of blue. It stands empty, but has not had time to fall into disrepair." the little bits of detail getting added to the picture im LOVE (1/?)

I’m gonna do these all as one post but broken up for ease of reference, I think.

Thank you! 🥰 Deciding the theme for the Tower and giving it that visual anchor really helped to pull things together. If you consider the whole setup, it seems unlikely the Tower was originally built as an observatory, since those tend to benefit from height (especially if you’re looking around you rather than up, but for the up ones also) and the builders could easily have put it on top of a mountain or at least some hills, but instead put it by the river. It’s above sea level, and it’s away from light pollution, but there were better locations. Nearby.

So either it wasn’t an observatory, and it’s been refitted as one, or they had so many observatories they didn’t care about locating them optimally, there was some other factor making having the tower there important even if it was suboptimal in terms of observation capacity. Or, potentially, it’s been moved since it was built!

:} Yay thank for being interested by the foreshadowing. I tried to put just enough in without actively overshadowing the actual place-setting-up and making the reader impatient with the description.

"If you look through an enchanted telescope you may see trees without needles fail halfway up the nearest of the great peaks, and even these fail before the top, though there is a span of nearly barren stone past that line, before the snow begins." you: mentions different plants living in different climates me: :0 / there's so much good description!! its all so pretty!! (2/?)

sflka;l;jlk i mean yeah, that’s pretty straightforward isn’t it. But! It establishes How Much Mountain it is visually rather than by saying ‘it was a big fucking mountain’ or ‘it was tall enough for the thinness of atmosphere near the top to create a small tundra region.’

o(*￣▽￣*)ブ

<3 Thank you! I kinda cut loose lmao.

"blocks veined with every color, pale blues and purples, reds and greens and golden-duns all mottling toward white and grey and black" god i want to live there so badly!! this tower is meeting all my standards!! cool pretty magic tower with rad telescopes!!! / "make a remark no one present understands about a Doctor named Seuss. His guide, the dousing tracker Amnaphi, will assume this person to be a famous astronomer from his homeland." im love!! misunderstandings about references!! (?/?)

💗💖✨ Yay! That’s an important feeling to create in fantasy, imo. The wanting.

I really enjoyed playing with the standard forms for ‘thing made of marble’ here, because all these marbles really exist, but in spite of the existence of the word ‘marbled’ our narrative uses of it tend to be tied up with Neoclassical aesthetics. So very white and smooth, yeah?

Also idk if it’s obvious to the reader but this Tower is to some degree in dialogue with Orthanc, which made a great impression on my mind as a child as the iconic wizardly tower, and while I don’t disagree with any of Tolkien’s use of symbolism for the purposes he was deploying it, there’s so much potential in Isengard as a setting that LotR had no space to explore, even if Tolkien would have noticed those angles at all.

Like...the parkland around the Tower is shown being despoiled for the orcish war machine and then reconquered by the forest, but of course it wasn’t forest to begin with. What was it for before Saruman lost his shit? Ordered gardens, for peaceful contemplation? Who dedicated the space that way? Who maintained it?

Did Saruman employ a gardener? Did he design his own gardens, or did they come with the keep, which we’re informed was built not by him but by the Numenoreans?

(“I liked white better” is still one of the greatest lines in a fantasy novel, Tolkien does not get enough credit for his contextually hilarious one-liners that rely on pointed code-switching, but Saruman’s evil rainbow oil-slick robes also sounded really baller and it’s kind of a shame they were not attempted for the movie lol.)

The fact that this is a world designed around a kid getting portal-fantasied into it and staying for 30 years really gives me some options which are fun to deploy but also like. Risky lmao. Because it encourages the reader to surface from the setting-logic and apply their own perspective, which can really break up the magic.

Being able to zoom out on the Tower after all that detail and be like ‘it’s awesome but also it looks like something Doctor Seuss would draw’ was fun though.

"Within the even hexagon of its outer wall, the Tower encloses a great parkland, enough that if it was all put under cultivation it could easily feed as many people as could live in the Tower itself." the tower has PLANTS i love it so much / "Ten Years’ Winter" god PLEASE tell me this is going to get into the agriculture and society stuff game of thrones didn't about long winters that would be SO cool / "Watchers of the Stars" AND they have a cool name holy shit (?/?)

Plants are important! As is food supply. As everyone who’s been reading this blog for a while already knows I think lol.

I mean, it’s not about that, really? The Ten Years’ Winter is a historical event--the most recent meteor impact severe enough to have global climate fallout. The dust it kicked up took a while to settle, and the famines were pretty severe.

But the cultural consequences of something that happened a hundred and fifty years ago exist, and are important, including the relationship between governance and disaster preparedness, which varies a lot regionally as you may imagine.

Astronomy has a long history as a wizardly sort of activity in the real world, both because it’s had continual overlap with astrology and just because the process has always been mystical and abstruse. In this setting, with a history of both devastating meteor impacts and being invaded from the Moon, but also actual magic, it’s got more obvious practical importance. Although since neither of these are remotely everyday occurrences, the average person on the street might not agree lol.

So it’s on the one hand a purely descriptive title, and on the other hand a serious boast, suggesting as it does that they are primarily responsible for Watching The Sky For Stuff. While also having broader philosophical implications and just sounding nice lol.

You gotta have good marketing if you want to persist as a wizardly order, because if talented students aren’t motivated to come to you how will you gain new members? Natural replacement is not an ideal strategy to say the least. That’s how you turn into a cult instead of an intellectual powerhouse.

"The northern third of the Tower’s park contains neatly regimented orchards, apples, pears, plums, and a few rows of carefully tended peaches and apricots, all clipped flat against low brick walls angled south and slightly west." hhh t r e e s / "wizards, while enthusiastic about innovation in the abstract, hate change." me too, wizards. me too / "The Tower grounds are filled with refugees." ooh now we get to why everything was empty earlier (?/?)

Trees! Which are also food!

And technology lol. Greenhouses built against fruit walls with good insulation are so much more sensible than ones heated from inside. Obviously as a passive solar-powered technology these only work when the sun is available and not, for example, cut off by a giant dust cloud.

These people are fairly acutely aware of their dependence on the sun and it figures prominently in a majority of their religions and their magical theory, even more than in ours.

There seems to be a mild consensus that the wizards are relatable. In truth: we are all wizards. :D

Yup! At long last lol.

"This division corresponds imperfectly to the usual split of the town by the course of the Meroda." because people!! take comfort!! in what normalcy they can find!! / "Makeshift pallets line the spaces between every fruit wall—the injured are being laid out here, now that the Tower is full, to get the benefit at night of the warmth meant to mature fruit." the awesome magic tower people trying to do everything they can for the injured who come to them for help in case i thought i couldn't be (?)

more in love / "Half of them are making ready to turn south along the Meroda." oh nooooo / "but the Moon People are the successors of the ancient magics, and just because they could not break the walls the last time they came, according to legend, does not mean they have not worked out a method now." im so worried for the people oh no (?)

Yeah! It really seemed natural. But of course they also aren’t recreating it obsessively; lots of people are grouping up with relatives who normally live across the river, or with people in the same line of work on the river, because people also adapt to circumstances.

No institution is ever perfect, of course, but I’m glad the Watchers have come across this way so far. They’re broadly well-intentioned and mostly well-organized.

And they were not ready for this.

A significant fraction of the reason for the order of the Watchers to exist at all, particularly in this observatory with its great eye fixed ever on the face of the green moon, is to be able to warn the world if this ever happens again. But the Moon People knew they were being watched, this time, and they kept all the build-up to mobilization that might have given them away on the far side of the moon until the last minute.

What the Magister is doing, as I hope was made clear or at least successfully indicated--I wish your commentary on the ending had come through!--is summoning what turns out to be an actual child from another world to do hero stuff.

Even if he’d gotten an adult that would be kidnapping someone to help with your problems, a routine element of the portal fantasy whose ethics have been addressed in a variety of ways, most famously ‘is Lion Jesus and always right.’

The reason they need a hero from another world is that the Moon People build a lot of their wards and their offensive and disabling magical attacks around a targeting system based on what planet people are from, because even though they’re originally from the same stock--they’re the descendants of ancient moon colonists who evacuated ahead of a major meteor impact somewhere approaching four thousand years ago--on a magical level having been born and raised on the planet or the moon makes a pretty huge difference.

So no one can get into the place their magic space elevator is anchored and fuck it up so they can’t keep bringing troops and supply in and loot out. Their single supply line is their only strategic weakness, and they’ve taken appropriate precautions.

Getting someone in from a third location is the best idea anyone’s been able to come up with in the very limited time available. Since no one can figure out how to turn one of the Moon People against the cause they came here for, on short notice, when they aren’t even stopping to talk to anyone so far. Like, that’s clearly not going to happen.

Heron Yl Fanult isn’t unaware that it’s ethically questionable, but he’s doing it anyway.

So I’m glad the ominous imminent oncoming of the Moon People can really be felt, because that atmosphere is fairly essential context for the decisionmaking going on at the top of the Tower.

"Young wizards sit in their bunks, six each to rooms that were previously individual, and hold lighting cupped dancing in their palms." a quick break from being worried to point out that this is rad as hell / "some with their heads decorously covered..." cultural differences!! especially with regional purposes like the Hedro!!

Thank you! 😆💖 I thought so too lol.

It also establishes the parameters of the magic system a little more. Throwing lightning bolts is pretty iconicly high-powered, right? And here it’s what most of the student wizards are practicing in anticipation of a battle, because most of them aren’t specced into combat and this is actually one of the easier lethal spells to master, especially if you have an academic background.

‘Electrocute’ isn’t a very flexible spell and it’s easy to lose control of, but it’s actually easier than, say, ‘set on fire to a significant degree in a non-electrical manner’ because concentrating a lot of heat in a certain location takes a lot more brute force than encouraging ionization.

You can pull most of the actual destructive force for the palm lightning spell out of the physical air and/or earth if you grasp the principles, which is much easier than channeling a comparable amount of magic directly because it doesn’t have to go through you.

The limiting factors on magic in this setting are how much power you can tap into and how much of it you can actually use without hurting or killing yourself. It’s not usually a lot, though the amount can be increased by things like choosing your workspace, prepping your workspace, and a whole lot of practice and meditation and things like that.

Magical traditions that get bundled under the heading of wizardry tend to focus on force multiplication, obtaining enough contextual understanding of a subject to make whatever power is applied go further. This means a lot of studying theory and using magic to make observations (such as the existence of microorganisms and their connection to disease) and often results in making clever devices based on what you’ve learned that may not actually wind up being magical at all.

Which is why the solar greenhouse proposal is considered ‘more wizardly’ than the fruit walls, which are wizardly in the first place even though the technology is pretty widespread at this point--it’s carried the principle of minimizing the energy you have to invest to get the result you want to the logical conclusion, where you don’t have to do any magic at all, you just set up the situation and get out of the way and the sun will do the work for you.

Other schools of magic, particularly religious ones, are more likely to emphasize just getting better at handling energy for yourself, which tends to yield a lot more in the way of immediate practical dividends and in a lot of quarters wizards who don’t do something obviously practical like physic or smithcraft with their theoretical background are considered crackpots or dilettantes

An impression helped along by the fact that being taken on as a student of wizardry at a basic level tends to focus more on your reading comprehension than your ability to actually do any magic, so in places where religious and wizardly institutions coexist the most talented students have a tendency to gravitate toward the religious life. This is particularly marked in areas religiously dominated by the Compact of the Golden Circle, wherein full ordination is contingent on being able to pull off certain fairly hefty rituals, so if you aren’t physically or mentally up to that kind of magical heavy lifting your religious career will stall out in one of the lay fraternities. In some of the cities on Sutouchel, the landmass to the southeast where the Compact is based, a slang term for wizard is ‘sanctum washout.’

But of course force multiplication is something that can scale up pretty far, and studying theory doesn’t stop you from also putting work into your practical skills, and not having talent isn’t the only reason someone would choose not to seek out a clerical career, if it’s even an option. Religion along the Meroda is pretty localized; communities tend to have local deities who correspond to a natural feature like the nearest mountain or the river or something, and if that deity rates a fulltime shrine the keeper also tends to be the major local medical provider, and since the wizards got settled in at the Tower it’s become pretty popular for shrinekeeping families to send their kids there for a year or two to get some educational polish in addition to what their parent already emphasized.

So depending on where you live and what your personal experience has been you’re going to have very different ideas about what wizards are good for.

Hrm. I’ve gone on a tangent. But that wound up taking so long you came back! :D I love it when being turtle works out in my favor.

Or was this actually the meta I was supposed to be doing in the first place? Aaaaa who knows.

im fairly confident you said eight asks survived so this is number nine? anyways onwards! "The hale survivors of the First Battle of the Second Descent sit waiting in their leathers, jack-chains and helmets laughably inadequate armor against the coming danger, and yet the best hope now just as they were on Carun Tol once the wizard fell" i have a lot of emotions about how their best bet is also a terrible bet but its all they have (9/?)

Yes 8.

Woo, thank you! ^^ & I love that you described it that way because that also describes the ‘summon alien’ spell Yl Fanult is casting and echoing the same emotional theme throughout the scene was very much the goal here.

"Threads have escaped from the braids pinned across the top of her skull: she has not had the chance to take them down for two days." god just the continuation of how desperate everything is / "He leans forward to peer through the narrow glass that has been turned on its articulated base to face the middle of the room, and relaxes very slightly. At least there has been no catastrophic alteration there, either." what does that one do id assume theres no approching army in the middle of the room -

:D Yeah, the fact that one of the chief medics available is already overworked to the point of neglecting nonessential personal hygiene and the enemy isn’t even here yet I hoped would resonate.

Well, remember how some of the telescopes at the beginning point in directions not included in the normal three dimensions of space? :}

- "trained as it long has been upon the face of the moon" also forgot to mention their enemies being from the moon is Rad As Hell / "He snaps his fingers for a spark that falls into the deep circular groove full of distilled spirits, and steps through that as well. He is not burned." ooooh whats he doing / "At his feet lie a glittering piece of gold ore, a moonstone, and a carefully sanded round of pumice." i see the connection to the moonstone bc moon army but i wonder about the others -

Thank you! It took a fair amount of poking before I decided it was a solid approach; it provides just enough physical alienation that there’s no direct cultural relationship and you can have that ‘everyone in the entire world Disliked That’ vibe, without needing to create any complicated magical and cultural explanation for such a long run of isolationism. They were out of contact because they were On The Moon.

Also I really get a kick out of putting space invaders in a fantasy setting in a way that stops just short of turning into sci-fi.

I’m glad the ritual lead-up is exciting! Even if the foreshadowing wasn’t as obvious as I thought it was lol. That’s fixable.

Gold is for the sun, moonstone is yeah for the moon lol (although in other circumstances people also use jade, because it’s been a long time since the moon was uniformly silver on account of it having been terraformed a few thousand years ago) and pumice is for the world--it’s a stone full of air that floats on water, so it’s popular as an anchoring device for rituals that call on all three local celestial bodies.

"He cannot take much time. He has only until the ring of fire dies." whats he doingggggg / anyways i love this so much!! the descriptions are gorgeous and im so invested in all of everything!! i hope you write more im so curious about it all!!

XD Ok I covered this already, I would have saved it for down here or Been Mysterious if tumblr hadn’t eaten the last few asks the first time lol. Thank you so much again! For encouragement! Before and now! I’ll try! To keep it going!

Here’s hoping this successfully posts, tumblr just kicked me onto New Dashboard again and disabled the turn-it-off button, so now my alternate posting strategy is borked up too. 🤞😅😘

#hoc est meum #ask #worldbuilding #a nonny mouse #the tower of sight #people say nice things #long post #<3

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