Author’s Sidebar: Pain and Injury (Plus Addendum)
The question that came up in response to the most recent chapters is “What causes Mackenzie to feel pain, if she’s not actually injured?”
The answer is very simple, and it’s got nothing to do with interior bruising. If her own body could injure itself as one part knocked against another, she’d probably be badly concussed, if not dead… her magical skull was not injured by the non-magical fist or the non-magical wall… but what about her brain receiving its share of the impact from the magical skull?
It’s got nothing to do with ingrained psychosomatic responses, either. Yes, the pain she feels is “in her head”, but it’s just as real as the pain you feel in your head. (Or it would be, if she weren’t fictional.)
I have, in fact, tried to explain this on the forum, the last time she had a bad non-injury… though the forum registration is still broken (sidebar sidenote: there’s a phpBB upgrade coming out on Thursday… I’m going to install the new version, see if it will let me import the old data… and if it doesn’t, we’ll just start with a clean slate. I’ll make the old version available as an archive, though.), so that’s not terribly helpful.
Therefore, I’m writing this sidebar so that anybody who wishes to know the mystery of Mackenzie’s lingering pains can read it.
However, in case some of you would rather speculate or prefer to have your own version instead of having the Definitive Author’s Authoratitive Version, or simply don’t care, I’m hiding that answer, and the subsequent elaboration, behind a “more” cut.
