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The Story Within a Story - Friendship

 Hello. C J here. This is another post in my ongoing series about the real life spirituality and magic that inspired me to write The Astral Chronicle and design its setting Creation in the first place. This post is about friendship. My main goal this whole time was a puzzle, one left by Isaac Asimov for a future author to solve. Can we have usable energy to power our society forever? Thermodynamics says we can’t. Quantum mechanics says we can. Isaac Asimov left a challenge and I think I’ve found the missing piece to it.

The Astral Chronicle and Creation the setting are also heavily inspired by lucid dreaming, the real life science of being awake in your dreams. Lucid dreaming comes up a lot in the nine-part novel series starting in volume five or six according to my plans. Currently I have until the end of volume two written and ready to release. There’s one more thing I wanted though, one more puzzle I felt needed solving. But first, I’m going to talk about a video game.

So the classic xbox 360 game Tales of Vesperia was great. I’ve beaten it twice and need to get a new copy of it for my Switch. A little while ago I was going to look into it as a source of inspiration for a story. Then I realized that almost every mechanic in it, from the combat to the spells to the mythic creatures you meet, is already in my setting. My setting is based on real life magic. Apparently so is it.

Tales of Vesperia follows the long tradition in that game line of outfitting the main character with a sword. I realized that this is consistent with a lot of games. You know who else uses a sword? Harry Potter. They kill several harmful magic items with an ancient magical sword in that series. Harry Potter is known to get magic ideas correct without meaning to. Swords exist in just about every culture including ours. In one scene in Verperia you destroy a magic barrier with an ancient magical sword.

Is Vesperia trying to tell us something? I know a lot of spellbooks in real life that have spells for making magic barriers out of the air or out of light. I know some incantations for armouring yourself with golden light to prevent harmful magic from affecting you. I know a spell to make yourself a spiritual weapon that I wrote myself a while ago that needs to be shared in a story at some point. So does a real life spiritual weapon cancel out a real life magic barrier?

Then here’s the point. Vesperia features a race of beautifully designed and also unique creatures called Entelexeia. These are powerful beings who are critical to the player characters winning the game. Entelexeia resemble the five magical beasts of Chinese magic a lot. Are we talking about real being here? Are they a depiction of Chinese gods or spiritual animals who wanted to be in a game? If so, can I have one as a friend?

There’s a spell I know that I’ve read in multiple spellbooks to summon a super hero character to aid you in a task. I’ve never done it but apparently it works great. But could I have a pokemon instead? I’m hand drawing humanoid versions of all the first three generations of pokemon. According to several spells I know you can summon anything you have an image of and a name for. I want one as a friend. Apparently so do the creators who made that video game.

C J Mcpherson

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