oooo what about a chapter from the perspective of the peanut gallery NPC. Non-descriptive student X who is always just on the edge of the protagonist circle but never involved but witnesses the shenanigans of sebastian and crew. His special skills are a high level of common sense and pragmatism.
something crazy happens
Student X: “who the hell are these people. Did NO one notice sebastian just walked to the abandoned classroom/broomcloset for the 4th time today? Just me?”
I would love to see some side stories:
Some of the other’s displays at the showing. Sebastian might have been the most impressive, but I would love to see Ana or Damien doing theirs.
Liza in the Haze War.
Actually just any viewpoint from during the Haze War, actually.
Siobhan’s grandfather’s POV teaching her magic as a child.
The Red Guard dealing with another Aberrant.
I think it would be nice to finally see Ana’s POV and her thoughts on, her fight with S, operation Defenestration.
Liza’s POV When she’s working on the sleep proxy spell on her own. Maybe we could get more details about the spell and the result of the tests she did on pixies instead of ravens.
Tanya POV when Newton broke.
Professor Ilma trying to get her precious books back from Thadeus.
And maybe a bonus chapter about Ennis before and after his trial.
Omg, I would love to be some random student witnessing iima all but begging for her books back from lacer
And takes it all out of context
And even better, rumor comes around to the royals and S and it is completely blown awry
Re-reading the book, I got to chapter 216 where Thaddeus tries to find out Sebastien’s connection to Siobahn. I remember at the time wishing there was another version of the chapter (addition, not instead) from Sebastien’s viewpoint. I can only imagine what was going through her head.
Nunchkin from Practical Casting class! We know very little about Nunchkin other than he’s a fourth-term student who is repeating Practical Casting. Does he want to be a free caster? How could he justify the cost of repeating the class if he didn’t? What do higher level classes look like? He stood out because we’ve never really seen another student go up against Sebastian in direct competition and give a real challenge. How would he feel about his claim to fame being having once bested Thaddeus Lacer’s prodigious apprentice in his field of specialization? What is a “normal” student’s opinion of Sebastian’s growth? What about his opinion of the crazy events like Fehkten’s exam, exhibition displays, or a certain duel?
Thaddeus Lacer drinking a Frappuccino. Why? Who knows. An Aberrant with a mild anomalous effect that feeds off of your misery and compels you to do low stakes things that you hate? Loss in a duel? Siobhan’s nightmare creeping into his skull, finding out that he’s wired all wrong, and tormenting him with horror instead of terror? Waking up from his Frappuccino nightmare, finding out that he taught one of his advanced classes with froth on his beard, and being mocked by the faculty…
This is my crackpot suggestion of the month.
If we’re doing crackpot suggestions…
A short where they discover mantis shrimp do not actually see more colours than humans and puzzle over why they’ve successfully been substituted in spells for prognos eyes.
Why am I suggesting this?
I looked it up. Apparently it was debunked in 2014. I think it’s a hilarious example of something we can all nod along with and agree on only to later discover it’s false.
My personal thoughts on the matter - it might well be a combination of having all those extra receptors plus a firmly held belief in the capabilities of shrimp along with a general haziness of people’s understanding of eyes. Since it was probably used in transmogrification rather than transfiguration then it could have been running off of the idea rather than the reality.
Anyway, I figure that would probably hit home for a lot of readers since they, like me, believed in super mantis colour vision.
Bring them on. I believe we’re voting for the most liked suggestions, so anything goes. Honeymoon Suite was kind of a crackpot suggestion at first, and Azalea made it into a masterpiece. She has the midas touch!
That said… I’m disappointed to know I’ve believed a lie for over a decade. A shrimpy lie.
I’m sorry Hannah, but you’ve just activated my trap card (read: special interest in the color vision circuit).
Anyway, the thing is that none of that actually contradicts them seeing extra colors, they still do see colors that we do not, it is just that they are able to distinguish as many shades and variations within those colors as we can, which is a different thing.
I could go into it in A LOT more length, but basically our trichromaric eyes compare the light they get from things in order to determine a single peak frequency for every part of our visual field, and can distinguish ~10,000,000 different fine degradations of shades while mantis shrimp see maybe 100, because their simple vision circuit picks the top one or two of their (UP TO 16!!) receptors for each thing to be. But that still means that they see into infrared and ultraviolet and can do things like identify a blue pigment plus a yellow pigment as something different from a green pigment, something our visual system just isn’t capable of.
But even beyond that, mantis shrimp eyes have other notable features that would probably make them useful components. They can move their eyes independently in 3D space and can use this to have nearly 360° of vision, they have depth perception within each individual eye, some species can actually tune their spectral range to be more sensitive to their environments, changing their color perceptions as they go, they can perceive the polarization of light, etc.
They still would be very relevant as a component.
New idea: magical mantis shrimp as a familiar.
Just as beautiful and deadly, but now carriage sized and magic wielding. Myrddin could write an entry about one of those in his journal.
I love activating special interest trap cards, thank you Keid <3
Everything I read seemed to point at them being very poor at distinguishing between shades and talked about their inability to blend the way that humans do, but I forgot that UV and IR were probably the important bits similar to what a Prognos could see. In my head I was thinking of spells to protect a scene on canvas based on what the sacrificed “eye” would have seen and looking at the world as different species might see it and how the range would be larger but the subtleties might vanish and then a discussion on how that impacts their use as a component.
I guess I’ll have to find some other commonly held belief that’s been more definitively been debunked!
Maybe Prognos eyes are closer to that of manyis shrimp than people. That’s why they can see a broader spectrum of light and still have telescopic vision with only one eyeball.
