Chapter 184: An Alignment of Ethics

on October 30, 2013 in Volume 2 Book 6: Career Counseling

In Which Mackenzie Is Troubled By Reassurance

I usually made a point to get to class early in general, even when it wasn’t one that I liked… this is pretty much a school survival technique for anyone who’s bad at keeping track of time and good at being distracted. If you wait until you needto head out, then it only takes one little thing to make you late. If you aim for getting there early, not only is there more wiggle room but you’re less likely to need it. After all, there aren’t many things that can come up that would make you late for class when you’re already there.

This time, for this class, I wasn’t in any hurry… I didn’t want to be sitting there alone in a mostly empty class room when Acantha glided in. I didn’t want to walk in late, either. Basically, my aim was to minimize the opportunities for a one-on-one conversation between the two of us. So I made sure I left Emily and Professor Stone’s company with enough time to arrive at the applied enchantment building at a measured pace.

I didn’t think about anything except my destination on the way, because getting lost in thought would probably screw up my arrival time. Once I reached the double doors with a few minutes to spare, I let myself relax… not that the prospect of confronting (or being confronted by) Acantha were relaxing, but the events of the morning and the previous night gave me other things to think about, and so I did.

After all, if my brain was bouncing between mulling over the potential for some more direct mentoring from Professor Stone and the awesome possibilities unlocked by my new wand, I wouldn’t be thinking about what I knew or suspected about Acantha when I saw her.

Stopping up the psychic leakage wouldn’t stop what I was feeling from showing up on my face, and it would be stupid to try to bluff a keen-eyed elf.

The best-case scenario was that she didn’t say anything about what happened, because then I wouldn’t have to. Coach Callahan had suggested I let Acantha know the coach suspected she was trying to copy or steal her prototype mockboxes in order to avoid having to try to lie to her, but I wasn’t going to blurt it out if the subject didn’t come up.

I ended up cutting things a little closer than I’d planned on the timing… not for any real specific reason, just because it’s difficult to pull that sort of thing off, especially when I didn’t normally walk from the Emily Center. It didn’t matter, though, because Acantha wasn’t there when I got there, and she still hadn’t shown up a few minutes into the class’s start time.

Had she vanished? If she didn’t show up for class and no arrangements had been made for her absence… not even a cancelation… then it might mean she’d learned everything she needed to and had no further need of her cover. Which I didn’t know for sure was a cover… but if she dropped it, that would be a pretty clear sign that it was. Maybe that was the weird thing about a cover: you could never be sure it had been there until it was gone.

“If she isn’t here by ten after, we can go, right?” someone said at a little past the five minute mark, as inevitably happened when a teacher wasn’t there at the start of the period. There was some scattered, forced laughter. “That’s the rule.”

Nobody bothered to respond. Nobody ever did… well, Two probably would if it ever happened in one of her classes. She would not only know that it wasn’t the rule, she would know what the actual rule was, which was more than I did.

Acantha glided into the room maybe a minute after that, saying, “Actually, if you check the student handbook, you’ll find there is no rule governing this… so if an instructor is not present at the start of class and you choose to leave, you’re making a gamble that they either won’t show up at all, or that they’ll find it reasonable to excuse absences in light of their own tardiness. Waiting longer decreases the odds that they will show up and tends to increase the odds that they will find early departures understandable, so I’d say that ten minutes is sub-optimal.”

If she’d entered the room right on the heels of the tired joke, it might have come off as cool or at least garnered some laughs, but nobody reacted. It was too wordy and too weird.

Acantha was… well, she might have been considered plain for an elf, but that was a lot of words to say that she was stunning. Her body was petite and angular, and habitually dressed in suits that were sharply tailored for the sort of frame that suits weren’t usually tailored for. I found her… fascinating. So far as I had a type, I didn’t think she was it, but still… fascinating.

Watching her teach the class was enough to make me doubt my suspicions. Sure, it had all seemed so plausible when I was talking it over with Coach Callahan, but Acantha a corporate raider? Up in front of the classroom, she was so… so… Acantha.

The awkwardness. The weird wordiness. The obvious (but increasingly contained) fear of public speaking. Okay, so maybe standing up in front of a bunch of late teens and early twenty somethings and commanding their respect was not among the skill set needed for corporate espionage, but you’d think she’d at least have the steeliness of nerves needed to fake that.

Class was a little more than half over before she spoke to me directly. We were working independently, weaving a spell we’d outlined into our practice wands. It was a basic illumination spell, but that was incidental… the real lesson was the on-off linkage. It was easy enough to make a wand with a bunch of light spell charges, or with the pattern of a light spell and an energy reservoir. It took a different technique to make a permanently sustained light spell that could be suspended and then reinstated. This was not part of the techniques I’d crammed on the night before, and I was glad to have something new to work on since it kept my mind engaged and away from troubling topics.

“I’m glad to see you working with your hands, Ms. Mackenzie,” Acantha said at a moment when I was safely between steps. “I was a little concerned when I saw your new gizmo… but I should know you know better.”

“Someone once told me something about learning to do it the hard way first,” I said.

“Is that how you came by your wand?”

“…it was a hard way,” I said. “I did have help, but I made sure I understood the techniques being used first.”

“Could you replicate the process yourself?” she asked.

“…not yet,” I said. “But I had an immediate need, and an opportunity to fulfill it.”

“Good answer,” she said. “Don’t get sloppy when we get to the later chapters in the book, though. Understanding the material enough to participate in a group exercise with a more experienced enchanter is not the same as understanding it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I’m not sure if I blushed, as I tended to do when those words slipped out of my mouth to anyone besides Amaranth, but thinking about that probably made me blush a little.

“Just Acantha will do fine, I think,” she said. “If you don’t have anywhere to be directly after class, I wouldn’t mind having a closer look at your handiwork.”

The first thing that popped into my head… absurd as it was… was that I shouldn’t trust her with my wand. But that was ridiculous. Even if the worst I thought of her was true, there was no reason anyone would be interested in a second year enchanting student’s personal wand. There were probably dozens of other examples in the building at the moment, and if none of them were exactly like the others, there was nothing particularly distinguished about any of them.

The time I took to process that was the time in which I should have been giving her an answer. It wasn’t supposed to be a trick question.

“Well, well… what does that facial expression mean, I wonder?” she said.

“I have something to tell you that I’m not sure how you’re going to take,” I said.

“Let us see if I can ease your mind a bit by front loading part of my reaction,” she said. “Your Coach Callahan doesn’t think very much of me, does she?”

“Oh, she thinks a lot of things about you,” I said. She was making it easy for me… I guessed that was the wisdom of Coach Callahan’s advice. Acantha would be a fool to think the coach wouldn’t be suspicious of her.

“And none of them are things you would care to repeat,” Acantha said. “For fear of offending me? Of damaging your standing with me?”

“…something like that,” I said.

“Well, if you’d like to stick around, we can talk about this after class,” she said, and glided off.

I felt a little stuck at that point… running off when the bell rang would be like saying that I shared in the coach’s low opinion of her, and the whole point of bringing the coach into it was to avoid that. I spent the rest of the class thinking about what I would say instead of what I was doing, which meant I didn’t get much done.

Then, of course, Acantha opened with something completely unexpected, making all that preparation irrelevant.

“Have you taken any business ethics courses?” she asked me when we were alone.

“No,” I said. “Not yet. It’s part of the program, but I don’t see any use for it until I’m, you know, in business.”

“Well, that attitude is all that’s keeping you from getting a real toehold in things now,” she said. “And after all, you’ve now found yourself in an ethical dilemma of exactly the sort you’ll face in the business. You want my advice?”

“Please,” I said. I didn’t know that her ethical advice would be sincere, or that it would be anything that I’d want to take, but if nothing else, I could learn something about her moral mindset from it.

“I’d suggest you take at least one business-related class every semester, starting with the next one,” she said. “You might want to start with ethics… or you might not. After all, it’s not as though you’ll be facing the same problem every semester.”

“That’s more business classes than I need,” I said.

“To earn your degree, yes, but a degree is not a career. My understanding is that you’re already a little ahead of your peers when it comes to the core classes, so this won’t put you behind. And let’s face it… five or ten years from now, how many enchantment credits you had under your belt by junior year isn’t going to be nearly as important to your life as how many contacts you made and what business skills you picked up. ”

“I was actually hoping for some more short-term advice?” I asked. “About my current situation.”

“Well… there’s the simple advice, and the real advice,” she said. “The simple advice is to always do right by your client.”

“And the real advice?” I asked.

“Always do right by yourself,” she said. “Most of the time… more than nine times out of ten… this will mean doing right by your client, and most of the time that it doesn’t… in the vast majority of situations where your interests are completely at odds with the client’s… the best thing to do then is to cut ties cleanly and openly. There aren’t a lot of situations where the long-term gain from screwing over the people who pay your bills is worth the negative repercussions. Always know what you’re throwing away when you do. A client’s goodwill, your reputation as someone who can be dependable or reliable… these things have value, and they’re hard to get back once they’re gone.”

“Coach Callahan’s not exactly paying me,” I said. “But you think I should do right by her?”

The weird thing was, the coach had given me the mirror image of this advice, pointing out that siding with Acantha would help me more in the long term than siding with her. Was this a ploy to divert suspicion from her? The whole spiel had sounded rehearsed, but so did most things that Acantha said… I was pretty sure she composed anything longer than a sentence or two in her head before she said it.

“No, but you’re acting as her agent,” Acantha said. “And do you want to be down in her bad books?”

“I don’t think I would be for long,” I said.

“And think about this: you’re a sophomore, yes?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So in the first semester of your second year, you have a teacher from another department asking your expertise,” Acantha said.

“I don’t think it has much to do with my expertise as much as my availability,” I said. “I was a convenient choice.”

“What, are you going to put that on your business cards?” Acantha asked. “All anyone else will know or need to know is that Callahan came to you when she needed someone with knowledge of enchantments on her side… and that you participated in a project that involved cutting edge, top-level enchantment. Those who are actually deeply involved with enchantment probably won’t make too much of that, since they regularly employ students with no real skill as power monkeys or just an extra set of hands… but somewhere in some otherdepartment, there’s an instructor who badly needs what he doesn’t know is a simple fix for his equipment, or a lecturer who needs help setting up an off-the-shelf crystal ball accessory that’s too intimidating for him.”

“This is getting away from the short-term… but it is good advice,” I said. “But… in the more specific immediate situation…”

“You don’t owe me anything,” she said. “Your client is Coach Callahan.”

“…and if I thought I could do right by myself in another way?” I asked, not really meaning it but curious what she would say if she thought there was a chance I might betray the coach for her.

“I would advise you to wait until you have more experience to try to make that kind of call,” she said. “Stick with the simple advice until you’re one hundred percent certain you’re ready for the real advice… and then stick with the simple advice anyway until the second or third time you’re sure you’ve got it, because you’ll be wrong at least that many times. Right now, if you decide you can’t work with Callahan… I would not blame you in the slightest. But I wouldn’t cross her, for the same reasons I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Thanks… this makes me feel a little better,” I said, and it did… but only a little.

It wasn’t the possibility that she was saying these things to alleviate suspicion that was nagging at me. If she was putting on an act, I didn’t think this advice was actually part of it. It seemed sincere, in the way that her classroom presentations did and her behavior during the night we were supposed to have examined the prototype mockboxes together hadn’t.

But if these were her sincere beliefs, they were… disquieting. Loyalty to one’s client… maybe to other people… was important to her, but only because this benefited her. Her objection to the idea of me double-crossing a client was that I was too inexperienced to do so effectively.

It was less an actual ethical framework and more a set of instructions for minimizing risk and maximizing influence.

It was the same logic that kept demons like the man who was my father technically honest ninety-nine percent of the time so they could pull off a big lie when they needed to. It was the logic that kept the murderous cannibal slaver Mercy operating within the law, while the law was on her side.

But I did feel a little better, because Acantha’s client here was the school… if she saw betraying a client as such a major last-ditch thing, then it seemed less likely she’d be doing that.

It seemed that way. I had a feeling that was too simplistic, but like she’d said, I didn’t have a lot of experience.


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51 Responses to “Chapter 184: An Alignment of Ethics”

  1. tomclark says:

    Wow. So the ends justify the means, to her? Mackenzie’s right about her ruthless pragmatism. It’s just as ugly as what we tend to see underneath every other elf in the series, surface or subterranean. They’re all massively screwed up in their own individual way…

    Current score: 0
    • J4n1 says:

      Ends justify the means to everyone.
      Personally i find the honesty of those who are willing to admit to it out front refreshing.

      Current score: 2
      • Julian Morrison says:

        Sociopaths think everyone thinks like a sociopath. But moral instincts are real. (See the recent research, for example, that babies will intentionally console an innocent wronged, but gloat over evil’s comeuppance.)

        And even in purely self centered consequentialist ethics, if you are ignoring the consequences of the means and only caring about the consequences of the ends, you are doing it wrong. You will shoot yourself in the foot with means that ruin your own ends.

        Current score: 0
        • Kanta says:

          That first part sounds like something somebody would say to justify the bad decisions they made because of the faults in their thinking caused by emotion.

          Current score: 0
      • Lunaroki says:

        The phrase “The ends justify the means” is broadly misunderstood. Most often people take “ends” to mean a very narrowly defined set of goals, with “side effects”, “unintended consequences”, and “collateral damage” not signifying. To truly understand the phrase all of these must be considered among the “ends”, which generally speaking those who wield this phrase do not do. Whatever results from one’s actions are the “ends” of those actions. One should always consider most carefully about employing bad means. More often than not they lead to bad ends.

        Current score: 3
    • Anthony says:

      I think the TVTropes article got it right: Our Elves Are More ****ed Up.

      Current score: 0
    • freeone3000 says:

      Acanthia’s advice seems pretty similar to the take-away from an engineering ethics course, actually. Moral absolutism makes sense when there are people at stake, but most situations in engineering or business just involve a ton of money. And there, the goal is to do right by your client, so you get hired again, while taking as much as you can, because money is good.

      Current score: 1
    • Daez says:

      You’ll find that the ends justify the means in a lot of real-life situations, if you stop to think about it.

      My soldier kills people. He’s payed very well to do it. He saves uncounted innocent lives with the cost of the deaths of a smaller number of very bad people. But at the end of the day, he’s still killing people.

      He puts his life on the line every day and is a government-sanctioned murderer. So were my brother and both of my grandfathers.

      Do the ends, of innocent lives saved, outweigh the means of taking another human life?

      Put that way, most people would say yes, they do. Not all, but… many.

      At heart humans are selfish creatures, who think first and foremost of their own gains. Even doing something nice for someone has a gain of one kind or another…..

      Current score: 0
      • Kanta says:

        That assumes that the people the soldier is killing are the, “Bad people,” and that the ones he’s saving are the, “Innocent lives.”
        What makes you so sure it’s not the other way around?

        Current score: 0
  2. pedestrian says:

    I would hypothesize, that the evident mega-ancient abandonment of the Elvish genus by their creator? deities, has left the Elves without any moral guidance.

    Since the peoples of the MUniverse apparently do not have the advantage of the phylogeny of evolutionary adaptation and development. Their ‘Coding’ relies on instruction sets from their creators. The programmer has to be available to update and correct code as circumstances dictate.

    Current score: 0
    • Marian says:

      Just a tiny word of warning: you may want to be careful with suggesting that one needs to have faith to have a moral compass. Even if it is in the context of a fantasy world.

      Regarding your theory about requiring constant ‘updating’ by their respective creators to retain their morality, I am not sure if I buy that argument. At the very least Mackenzie is proof against that statement, as is Two.

      Current score: 0
      • Anon says:

        I think the idea was less that religion is required for anyone to have a moral compass, and more that, in the specific instance of elves in this universe, they do not HAVE a moral compass. They have a moral flowchart written by a god who hasn’t updated it in eons, and their entire society is based on it.

        I’m not sure I buy into the idea, personally, but I think that’s what they were trying to communicate. And it is an interesting theory.

        Current score: 0
        • pedestrian says:

          Marian and Anon, I think that I agree with both of you. My perspective is based on my opinion that the people of the MUniverse (and now I guess the AUniverse)are basically creations of their respective (if not always respectable) deities.

          In general that each grouping of worshipers are dependent upon the moral guidance of their specific deity. They do not even have the delusion of free will (such as we pretend to have) or functional ability to mutate into something that did not exist before.

          If my hypothesis bears out, then it is TWO, the liberated? golem, who is actually the only one who has the capacity of evolving into something we cannot even comprehend yet.

          Current score: 0
    • zeel says:

      Well think about this, in the MUniverse there are many races with a sort of built in moral compass: Nymphs are naturally positive and moral (in their own way); demons are naturally negative, selfish, amoral, and dishonest. Now we know that those things are not absolutely true, only generally, and life experience can reshape those things (Barley).

      However other races, such as humans, do not start with any moral compass. Instead they learn morality from outside themselves. Parents, friends, religion, all influence the moral compass. For this kind of race it is easy to have wild variations in morality from individual to individual.

      Elves fall in that second category, but with a few interesting differences. For one, immortality. Most of the other immortal races fall in the first category as far as I can tell, Nymphs, Demons, (Golems?), etc, mostly have a baseline morality. But Elves live for centuries with nothing to influence their morality but each other and their ancient religion.

      And yes I would say the abandonment by their gods plays a role, for humans even if they are atheistic (or similar, atheism would be hard in this world) they would have to deal with all the highly devout people around them. But for Elves religion is on its way out, and as individuals grow older their moral compass starts to point towards themselves, with their own interests as top goal. Heck, if you are living forever you probably want to do so comfortably, so selfishness is going to get very attractive.

      For short lived races they will hang on to their morality for a lifetime, or just be classified as a terrible person, but for an Elf? They have more than a lifetime to shed morality when they realize that being moral isn’t in their best interest.

      And middling society is just a big clusterfuck of negative moral values that is going to make things all the worse.

      Current score: 0
      • zeel says:

        Oh damn it to hell. . . Someone delete the duplicates.

        Current score: 0
      • pedestrian says:

        Zeel, in general I agree with your assertion about the MUniverse genus, but in specific I disagree about human beings not having a built in moral compass.

        Unfortunately, it is biological and genetic and that means for every person their capacity? for moral values can be different. I argue that WE have less free will and direct our lives on our genetic-based instincts a lot more then our bloated ego’s are willing to admit to ourselves.

        The idea that as a species WE are deserving of the title ‘Homo Sapient’ is based on the outright racist, 19th century, pseudo-science of eugenics.

        The term ‘Homo Anthropophagus’ would be a lot more accurate. We manage to cushion ourselves from ourselves with the development of a civil society and worshiping the technology that is evolving to sustain it.

        Current score: 0
        • zeel says:

          I am talking about in-universe. Where genetics doesn’t exist. Humans and most of the other mortals seem to have little ingrained moral direction. By this I mean that, as like real humans, you are very likely too have a mix of ass holes and nice people, and anything in between, plus a sprinkling of murderers and saints. However some races, like Nymphs, are almost all “nice” as Amaranth put it, we know that the nice can be worn away, but Barley is a very odd exception. Or demons, which are basically all(?) dishonest ass holes (I am only referring to full blooded ones).

          Elves however are almost all ass holes, but there is no reason to believe that they were created to be ass holes specifically.

          Current score: 0
    • zeel says:

      Well think about this, in the MUniverse there are many races with a sort of built in moral compass: Nymphs are naturally positive and moral (in their own way); demons are naturally negative, selfish, amoral, and dishonest. Now we know that those things are not absolutely true, only generally, and life experience can reshape those things (Barley).

      However other races, such as humans, do not start with any moral compass. Instead they learn morality from outside themselves. Parents, friends, religion, all influence the moral compass. For this kind of race it is easy to have wild variations in morality from individual to individual.

      Elves fall in that second category, but with a few interesting differences. For one, immortality. Most of the other immortal races fall in the first category as far as I can tell, Nymphs, Demons, (Golems?), etc, mostly have a baseline morality. But Elves live for centuries with nothing to influence their morality but each other and their ancient religion.

      And yes I would say the abandonment by their gods plays a role, for humans even if they are atheistic (or similar, atheism would be hard in this world) they would have to deal with all the highly devout people around them. But for Elves religion is on its way out, and as individuals grow older their moral compass starts to point towards themselves, with their own interests as top goal. Heck, if you are living forever you probably want to do so comfortably, so selfishness is going to get very attractive.

      For short lived races they will hang on to their morality for a lifetime, or just be classified as a terrible person, but for an Elf? They have more than a lifetime to shed morality when they realize that being moral isn’t in their best interest.

      And middling society is just a big clusterfuck of negative moral values that is going to make things all the worse.

      Current score: 0
    • zeel says:

      [Duplicate]

      Current score: 0
  3. Cadnawes says:

    Happy Veil, everybody. Amusingly, when I got to the end of my reread, there this chapter was. How convenient!

    I’m actually terrible at subterfuge, and people like Acantha has revealed herself to be drive me nuts. I’m less soothed than Mackenzie here because we know how big a deal Acanttha has said this might be. Of course, is that even what she believes? It’s impossible from here to spot her real motives. It’s like… I might be on her side if I knew what her side was, but seeing how she operates I would never trust that this was a knowable item.

    Current score: 0
  4. Erm says:

    Basically, my aim was to minimize the opportunities for a one-on-one conversation between the two of us.

    Avoid a one-on-one conversation with someone who can whisper to you across a crowded room? That’s a great proposition.

    Current score: 0
    • Anthony says:

      It’s not much of a conversation when you can’t converse back…

      Current score: 0
      • Chris Martin says:

        Why not? Elvish hearing can hear you whisper back.

        Current score: 0
        • Rafinius says:

          Except that non-elvish whisper can be pretty much picked up by anyone who can hear roughly as good as an half-elf, and the chance for some third person like that in the class room aren’t that low I think.

          Current score: 0
  5. YayGasm says:

    But I did feel a little better, because Acantha’s client here was the school…

    Way to make assumptions Mac.

    Current score: 0
    • Zukira Phaera says:

      Whereas “But I did feel a little better, because Acantha’s supposed client would be likely to eat her if crossed” would be more reassuring. I can’t imagine a non suicidal elf risking her own skin in that case.

      Current score: 1
  6. Billy Bob says:

    Unlike some people who found Acantha’s views upsetting, I found them both spot-on and refreshingly honest.

    The idea that “doing what’s right for you” leads to selfish dishonesty and betrayal is wrong. Acantha points this out when she raises long-term versus short-term win. Cheating and tricking people is a short-term win but in the long term it’s typically a loss. Long-term wins most often come when you create situations of mutual benefit that persist for long periods.

    A lot of people operate on an emotionally simple level where they just try to be “good”. Sometimes that leads to overall benefit, but a lot of times it leads to less-than-ideal situations. Acantha’s perspective results in generally you’re a good person to yourself and others, and the times when you’re a jerk are not by accident or malice, but instead based on thoughtful consideration of the pros and cons.

    Current score: 3
    • Glenn says:

      Acantha told Mack that

      “There aren’t a lot of situations where the long-term gain from screwing over the people who pay your bills is worth the negative repercussions.”

      The question is, is the situation Mack and Acantha are in one of those very unusual situations? Unlike Mack, we know just how extremely dangerous Callahan really is. She’s been trying to start a world war, by trying to kill a God who plays a major role in maintaining the balance of power between the Old and New Empires. Callahan loves to kill immortals. As she says when talking to Embries,
      “I love killing immortals. It’s like knocking down a tree that extends all the way to the dome of heaven. It’s like wiping my ass on eternity. I could slaughter a whole village of elves, for instance, and it would get me so… well, I digress. The point is, there’s no rush like bringing down a being who isn’t only immortal but remembers the age of primordial creation. If I haven’t killed more greater dragons, it’s mainly because you’re so kosh-darn hard to find. It’s like hunting an endangered species.”
      I think it’s relevant to note here that many of Mack’s friends, like Dee, Two, Amaranth, and maybe Mack herself, are immortal. Granted, they are not old enough for their murders to be really exciting to Callahan, but I’ll bet she would still enjoy killing them.
      Callahan has already not only killed a God, she’s committed many other horrible crimes including genocide. (In the side story Pardon Me, Callahan had been charged with two counts of genocide, and didn’t deny she’d committed them.) I think Acantha suspects (probably correctly) that Callahan plans, among other things, to eventually commit genocide against the elves. So I don’t think industrial espionage is really what she’s doing here.

      Current score: 2
      • pedestrian says:

        Glenn, I must say that I am in awe of your analysis and I tentatively agree with your hypothesis. When I have had time to think more about your points I will get back to you.

        Current score: 0
  7. That one guy says:

    Here’s the thing that Mackenzie’s missing. Acantha’s client isn’t the school. The school just happens to be where Acantha’s working at the moment, where she stands a great chance of being nearby as someone works out the next Facebook, the next Google, or whatever the magical equivalent is. Meanwhile she has super hearing, super senses, and centuries of business acumen to draw upon. The school’s just where she’s biding her time waiting for the next meal ticket that her true client is waiting for. Now, given the Chancellor, Acantha isn’t about to screw over the school. But Callahan? In a way that doesn’t actually screw over Callahan? If someone else started making those boxes and profiting, just as the knowledge was slipped out so that everyone could make them, then the company that had already geared up and started production would be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, and Callahan probably wouldn’t be upset enough to come hunting, because the genie would be well and truly out of the bottle by then, and once out there’s no putting a genie back. So, I think Mack’s mistaken here. The school isn’t Acantha’s primary client. I wonder if Mercy is the primary client. Imagine if you could extend the mock duration to the traditional nine months. You could keep a female half-demon chained inside one box forever, and let out a new mock every nine months to have a possibly permanent child? Or would the child be temporary too?

    Current score: 0
    • Chris Martin says:

      If I remember correctly, the only time limitation on illusions was supplying them power (stop supplying power, illusion ends). Of course, there is the doppleganger effect, but I’m sure that isn’t much a problem when the two are kept apart.

      I like the thought on the child however and have two different comments on it.

      Logically, the child of an illusion is just part of the illusion and thus would end with the illusion… but as previously established, logic isn’t how MU works.

      Likely, the child would be permanent, but not half-demon. The child would likely be quarter-demon/quarter-human/half-illusion.

      That line could have countless interesting opportunities.

      Current score: 0
    • 'Nym-o-maniac says:

      I think the child would probably be entirely illusory. We’ve seen that illusions, unless they manage to kill you from shock (a la the D&D phantasmal killer, most likely), don’t really have the ability to cause permanent physical results. If you eat illusory food, you get hungry once it wears off. If you get stabbed with an illusory weapon, then the injury disappear, and no blood or anything results. So I’m pretty sure that real sperm interacting with an illusory egg would have about the same result as a real stomach interacting with illusory food – nothing substantial. Er, so to speak.

      Also, this seems like it would fall rather afoul of the “nobody likes a smartass” rule, which has led to the downfall of many mages.

      Current score: 0
      • Rafinius says:

        Another thing that supports this theory is the fact that all the entries and logs that were created by mock-Acantha disappeared when she did. And as far as I remember it was mentioned that illusions can’t create notes on paper that would outlast themselves.

        Current score: 0
        • Chris Martin says:

          Hence the reason I gave the logically portion…

          However, following logical conclusions is how very very bad things happen in MU.

          As described in one of the side stories in a discussion on how the rules of reality work in MU, it’s basically whatever makes a better story as far as the universe is concerned.

          Hence the half-illusion child being more likely just because it would be the more interesting result.

          This is of course assuming that they were not trying for a half-illusion child.

          Current score: 0
    • Seth says:

      You wouldn’t need to go to that much trouble. One half demon, driven completely mad and just causing random damage would be bad enough. Clone him 250 times, and the chaos would be … well.. chaos. Even if the damage was temporary on the order of minutes/hours it would create opportunity for a smaller real army cover to do significant permanent harm.

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      • Rafinius says:

        The goal here is to breed a Half-Demon army, not burn down a single random city.

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    • Kanta says:

      “Once out there’s no putting a genie back.”
      Unless you’re King Solomon, who put a lot of djinn in the bottles in the first place. And rings, lamps, and whatever else he had lying around.

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  8. Cadnawes says:

    I feel like I should clarify; I think acantha’s advice is actually pretty sound. But its like advice from the man. What do you do with good advice from an untrustworthy source? I don’t think its safe to trust her without knowing who her client is, and we certainly don’t know that. Doesn’t mean she isn’t likable, but like and trust don’t perfectly overlap.

    And frankly, I would never have let her even be in the same room with that wand if I were Mack. But then, I know in this world a university proff who stole patents from her students, and got away with it in court on the basis of “they wouldn’t have been able to come up with it without the information I taught them”

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    • Rafinius says:

      The advice seems sound because it is general and because it makes logical sense. In what way would Mackenzie sticking to her client except when she is sure it goes against her interests help Acantha?
      Also, there is no danger with Acantha seeing the wand because there is nothing really special about it. It’s a sturdy, personalized general enchanters wand, created with less than a weeks study. Not something you would actually patent.

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      • LurkerDreams says:

        About the wand – it was, in effect, a sophomore who created a project she normally wouldn’t bother with until junior/senior year. Not remarkable in her having one, but notable because she did the research, even if cheating a bit, to make one early because it solved a problem.

        Teachers like to see this sort of thing – if a student is working ahead because they can see the use in the work rather than just doing it by rote because it was assigned, when it was assigned, then once they do get to the advanced material then they tend to try unusual solutions or work even farther ahead.

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        • Seth says:

          If there was anything extraordinary about the wand, Prof. Stone would have mentioned it. And probably did – the most extraordinary thing about it is that Two was used to make it.

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  9. Cadnawes says:

    Rafinius, sorry, I would reply directly but, phone site.

    I think Acantha is offering good advice here that is generally safe to follow, and she is either doing it out of general proffessionalism or to regain Mackenzie,s trust. She did point out herself that dependability is a hard coin to earn twice. I’m just saying that in Mack’s place, I would mine this class for information, and enjoy Acantha’s teaching style, but I wouldn’t extend friendliness to actual trust. Acantha may be doing something benevolent or heroic but we just don’t know enough.

    As for her wand… a wand that enables direct communication with or manipulation of any enchanted item doesn’t strike you as unique? Remember she manipulated the locks on her door with it. I’m not sure its replicable, but still. The reality is, young people do things all the time that startle experts.

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    • Burnsidhe says:

      It’s not unique. Remember, the design professor has a ring that does the same function.

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      • Chris Martin says:

        Agreed, not unique. Just advanced for her current level of understanding.

        The communication factor is just a side-effect of a standard enchanters wand (hence both her and professor stone using it), as an enchanters wand just reads the qualities of an object too immense for the enchanter herself to read.

        And the manipulation factor I believe is one of the core elements of an enchanters wand. It’s there to help them manipulate things.

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  10. Riotllama says:

    Happy Veil, everyone!

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  11. Zathras IX says:

    “Having a closer
    Look at your handiwork” sounds
    Like a pick-up line

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  12. sanityoptional says:

    Typo report:

    “If you wait until you needto head out” is missing a space.

    “somewhere in some otherdepartment,” is also missing a space.

    Keep up the good work!

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  13. Dani says:

    The school is Acantha’s client in another sense: When she agreed to teach this class, she accepted a responsibility, bounded but non-trivial, to give her students good advice.

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  14. Computer Mad Scientist says:

    “It was the same logic that kept demons like the man who was my father technically honest ninety-nine percent of the time so they could pull off a big lie when they needed to.”

    It’s reassuring to know that Mackenzie realizes that is in fact what The Man Who Was In the Woods and is Now Around the University is doing.

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  15. Cadnawes says:

    Good point, Burnsidhe, but I get the impression that Mack’s might even be a bit better than Stone’s. Or she’s just better at reading Emily’s signs than he claims to be. My reasoning about why the wand might have extra oomph has to do with the fact that it was made by the combined efforts of an enchanter and an enchanted being who love one another, for the purposes of communicating with other enchanted beings. That sounds perfect, to me.

    Why I am insisting that it is not just a simple, slightly advanced, project, even tho she made it with basic techniques, is I definitely don’t get the impression that wands of “know every nook and cranny and enchantment in a building oh and by the way unlock doors” could possibly exist in any numbers or delving and other forms of thiefly skills would be a damn sight less dangerous.

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  16. P says:

    Regarding the wand, I’m not concerned about Acantha stealing Mackenzie’s ideas or sabotaging the wand. I’m scared for Two, when we don’t know just how unusual her abilities are. She may end up with her own Mercy after her and in some ways she is even less capable of handling that than Mackenzie, although I think she’s at a point where she can stand up for herself now.

    Current score: 0