Quote I Wrote For A Book I'm Writing;

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

Camp:

The Forsaken Falls Kingdom/Camp in Year 1 of the full zombie takeover.

Theres a wandering immortal who has been planting flowers and trees after the fall of Humanity..700 years later the remaining survivors wake up from cryosleep to a foreign, yet breath taking earth.

I loveee fantasy settings doing magical exhaustion:

burnt out pyromancers emitting steam and smoke

tired cryomancers shivering with visible foggy breath

weary necromancers looking ill and hearing voices

frazzled healers receiving the same cuts, bruises, and injuries of their patients

You couldn’t live this lie any longer. You finally confess to your blind spouse the truth of your cursed Gorgon nature, only for them to finish sipping their tea before calmly responding. “Of course you are, I’ve always known.”

I'd love to hear more about your Modern Monsters story.

Specifically about Johanna and her relationships with her friends and boyfriend.

Johanna's relationships with her friends and boyfriend (and, by extension, her family) have always been seen as a bit odd.

Meaning the brunette has always been extremely loyal to her friends and her partners and even her family unless given an extremely good reason not to (i.e betrayal, a large difference in views, etc).

Her death (?) as a child at her mother and village’s hands affected her greatly—making it difficult for her to be around her family, even if she would still do anything for the Everstone family's descendants.

She's had brief interactions with her family members before the events of the story but she hasn't communicated with these modern descendants of hers (except for the oldest of the family) yet. And when she does, it's awkward because it's still painful for her.

It doesn't help that the town of Evermore hasn't forgotten her. Hasn't forgotten the history her mother rewrote. Like the not so little detail where her mother changed her age at death from 12 to 19 to make her look better (spoiler alert: it didn't work with most people).

Being in Evermore and being around her family is painful. Hence why Johanna never really stuck around with for long in the last 397 years.

(She was born in 1616 and Evermore, Massachusetts was founded in 1620. She died and was revived in 1628).

In those 397, she made a lot of friends and dated a good amount of people: all of whom Johanna cared about deeply.

The first of her friends that Johanna met was Lucius Ryder, an incubus—who she met while trying to summon a demon. She was cursed during the incantation out of frustration and poof! There he was.

When he realized what had happened he laughed at her and refused to take her soul. Lucius stuck around as Johanna tried to summon one who would take her soul. That led to Morana Crimson (a demon), Desdemona Grimm (no one knows what the fuck she is), and Octavius Taranto (some kind of shapeshifter) showing up.

All of whom refused her soul.

Much to her frustration.

The four of them ended up sticking around in her life.

It's because of them she was able to save Halmar Starkden when she was sixteen after finding him after what his witch hunter did to him when he released someone they thought was a witch. They helped her nurse him back to health to the best of their ability.

Long before they found out he was a wizard.

Johanna has an uncanny ability of being at the right place at the wrong time and the wrong place at the wrong time. It's because of that ability that Johanna met all of her friends and saved them/got saved by them.

She was there with a magic ring when Douglas Graves struggled with being a skeleton. To explain what happened to him and to help him get readjusted into society.

Johanna was there when Fin Finley, a merman, was dying of dehydration. There when Mako Akula seemed shady but turned out to just be a 'monster' like the rest of them. There when Clover Boggs, a fairy, injured her wings and couldn't escape hunters. There when Samantha Bellweed, a tree nymph, was struggling with pollution. There for their friends when Victoria 'Ick' Eyessacs confronted all of them on not being human and she was there to answer Ick’s questions.

She was there when Ick turned out not to be human and she was there to help Silas Pan, a satyr, get used to the human world.

Johanna was there for the people who would become her friends and they were there for her.

Her friends were there for Johanna through every betrayal, every death, every tragic event, etc.

The lot of them are there to help discover the secrets of their pasts, the mysteries of the present, and being around one around is very beneficial to all of them because each of them? They are othered.

They are from different times, different places, and are living in a world that isn't full their own through choice and have been doing so for decades.

Does that make sense? I hope that answers your question.

I'm revamping the story so I can't mention every character. But I can definitely tell you more if you want.

Quotes From My Characters (Part 4);

-Erica Triggs, from 'The Deadly Game Of Life'.

Hanging out with old people rules because after a while they trust you enough to confess to murder totally unprompted

“So mermaids and sirens are two different species?” “Just so. My people, what you call mermaids or merfolk, share a common ancestor to you humans, making us distant cousins. What you call sirens, however, are fish that evolved to look and sound like humans to attract their favorite prey.”

First Line Prompt #5

A “THE END IS HERE” sign hangs around the neck of a zombie that limps through the view of the scope on their rifle.