Writing What You Don't Know: The Assistants

@cassikat, I have no direct experience with ballet, but random detail I learned from a teenage ballerina that surprised me: apparently the average lifespan for a pair of pointe shoes, in a serious practice schedule like you describe, is about two or three weeks. (And each pair costs about what you'd expect a pair of special-purpose shoes to cost.)

 

I'm writing a story in a society with more-or-less strict castes, and there's quite a bit of casteism going on. The protagonist was switched from one caste to a different one and has been struggling to adjust (they don't really want to), and they're an abrasive teenager. Part of their character development will be to be less of an asshole to people, but I don't want it to come across as "you need to be nice to your oppressors".

Spoiler: To go into detail, spoilered because long

The setting is a city floating in the air, Kiliskalea. There is no contact to the world below since the city rose into the air about four hundred years ago when the god of magic (since disappeared) had a bitchfight with the god of technology (also since disappeared).

The previously multicultural and open-minded city splintered into three castes: The mages, the ungifted, and the techies.

The mages believe the city belongs to them and de facto rule it - the most prestigious jobs require magework, and are only open to mages. You are born a mage, although it is a mutation that can randomly crop up in ungifted or techie families. If it is revealed that an ungifted or techie person has the mage gift, they are put in the mage academy, and become members of the mage caste, although their access to certain jobs is limited.
The council ruling the city is made up of a majority of people from mage lines, with the official reasoning that people from ungifted or techie families can't possibly know what they're talking about.
The teachers and supervisors (especially the latter) at the academy are trained to promote the mage gift as the greatest of them all, and it's promoted to be a great honour to join the mages if you come from one of the lesser castes. There are quite a few people from ungifted families, and, as far as I'm aware, currently only one person who came from a techie family (the protagonist). It is likely that people who originally came from techie families are forbidden to holding teaching jobs, and possibly are under some sort of surveillance to prevent them from congregating.

The ungifted are considered pitiable and not a danger by the mages, just as they like it. Stuck with the knowledge that the city will need to be kept running but that the mages consider themselves above menial work except to show off, they constitute the majority of the workforce, maintain the infrastructure, do clerical work, and trade.
They are likely the reason the techies still exist as such, as they trade with them, providing food and materials in exchange for technology and specialist craftsmanship and maintenance. Their connections to the techies reduce their reliance on the mages.
They carefully maneuver around so the mages don't notice what they're doing, as there have been 'tragic accidents' among families and companies that have become 'too uppity' in the eyes of the mages, accumulated too much wealth, become too overtly independent.
Among the ungifted on the surrounding land which supplies the crops necessary for Kiliskalea's continued survival, technology, magic, and plain manual labour are more equal, as each have their advantages and drawbacks.

The techies are confined to a natural island in the middle of Kiliskalea, created by the everflowing river springing in Castle Kiliskalea splitting in two and uniting again on the other side, called "Sage Hill". They are not allowed to leave, and are generally mistrusted by the mages and ungifted alike, but where the mages paint them as overt threat, the ungifted acknowledge that these people are angry and cornered and seek safety in their tightly-knit community.
The techies take in everyone who gets cast out because they displayed a tech gift (there is a difference between the ability to use and build technology, and having the gift) and integrate them into their community. It's an everyone-knows-everyone, communal, us-versus-them setup grown from the fact that it's the only way to survive.
They harbour resentment towards the mages, and respect towards the merchants who face the ostracism coming with dealing with them and supply food and materials in exchange for technology and craftsmanship.
There are a number of apparently ungifted among their number, who actually have the mage gift, but keep it secret. As long as you don't use it, you're one of them, and they will protect you as their own, because you have been born to their own.

Technically speaking there are twice-gifted, but they are vanishingly few and keep it secret, as the twice-gift is definite proof against the often-cited mortal animosity of technology and magic.

Our ex-techie protagonist, Jhenya, is twice-gifted. They kept it under wraps, until an official invitation to the academy of magic was delivered when they were in their early teens, and officially cast out from Sage Hill. They are fiercely proud of their techie heritage and show great animosity towards everyone at the academy (although they are nicer to people from ungifted families), until they befriended Vaska and Gwyned.
Gwyned is a shy person coming from a rich ungifted family, and Jhenya became fiercely protective of them because Gwyned's parents are awful and they generally don't have anyone except their caretaker Amber, which was an utterly horrible and alien thing to Jhenya who had grown up with what basically amounts to a lot of siblings (communally raised) and people they could rely on.
Vaska developed into the local heart-throb, but before that they were that openly dorky and nerdy and excitable kid who was very interested in basically everything. Jhenya thought Vaska was fishing for weaknesses at first, but they continued being happy and friendly and eventually won them over when someone was shittalking and Vaska was like "yo not cool", which basically cemented Vaska as family. Vaska also is a fucking prodigy.
Amber is the caretaker and teacher Gwyned's parents hired to take care of Gwyned, and was, for the longest time, the only person they could really talk to. She isn't a Kalea, but instead a Beladi, and doesn't speak about her family. She is an extremely powerful and skilled mage who taught Gwyned, Jhenya, and Vaska a lot and should, by all means, have a council job, not work as nanny to a girl from an ungifted family, mage or not.
Jhenya is abrasive and rude, mostly because they have no brain-to-mouth filter and a great deal of animosity towards everything mage-y, but they are reliable, diligent, and skilled, will do their part of the groupwork with great care, patiently explain not understood processes, and rebuke dogpiling. If they are yelling at someone for something, no one else is allowed to interfere, and you better keep your clique bullshit out of their earshot or daberach help you.
Has trouble believing people when they show interest in them or their work, as some assholes took advantage of that.

Spoiler: And then everything went to hell

With me so far? Cool.
Well, the society up there took a wrecking ball to the face in the shape of a magic-draining mist enveloping it, at the start of the story several months ago, and people started disappearing, with Amber, Vaska, and Gwyned being the first people to vanish. (Would like to make it either 8 months because arc number, or 4 because other arc number, but I'm not sure how to balance time elapsed with the state of the city. Longer would mean I can get a way with a rate of disappearance that is not utterly insane, but would also mean that the state of the city has shifted a lot more, and possibly somewhat stabilised.)
There are two phases to the mist, which alternate in semi-regular intervals. When it's lighter, visibility is between 150 and 300 feet. This is considered the "safe" phase, in which people can go outside, and is used by the ungifted and the mist fishers (the mage academy students who are sick of being stuck in their dorms) to do their supply runs. It's still dangerous, though, and people still disappear.
Once visibility drops below 150 feet, it's considered the other phase, which has a much higher rate of disappearances, and you're not safe even if you don't have the mage gift. No one knows what takes the people out then, people just don't return.
The mage families have all but vanished, they were the first victims, and the ungifted have basically taken over, as far as they dare to.
The techies are up to something, but have not yet made any overt moves, which is a thing I'm confused about because this is basically prime time to go out and renegotiate terms with the ungifted, as the techies seem curiously unaffected by the mist, and their technologies are uniquely efficient in the mist as there is no magic to drain.

The mist fishers, however, are the only people who dare explore the abandoned areas, venturing off secure paths, and are acting individually, and are distrusted by the ungifted as well. There's rumors that either them and or the techies have something to do with the mist. They are also the largest remaining group of mages, and no one understands why.

That's the general setting. The people at the academy dorms are about an even mixture of mageborn and ungiftedborn mages, most indifferent towards Jhenya, some avoid them, some are adversarial (for a variety of reasons ranging from being pissed that Jhenya is rude to arrogance regarding their techie heritage), while others try to be friendly. Jhenya needs to understand and accept that not everyone is as hostile towards them as they believe and accept them as equals (and friends), but currently one of my greatest issues, as outlined above, is that I want it to be a "stop being a fucking asshole" development and not a "be nice to your oppressors" one.

I'll also welcome any pointers towards hashing out the state of the city and how much time could reasonably have passed -- at least two suburbs are completely deserted due to people congregating to stay closer to others and due to the disappearances and the ungifted have established a system to keep the population fed with food from the surrounding lands and existent food stores, as well as an information infrastructure, but it's still too early for them to have really adjusted to this exceptional state, and they haven't ventured out to get to the bottom of this.
Neither have the techies ventured out much yet, although this will happen during the course of the story, aka very soon.

 

Does anyone speak German enough to translate some text from English better than google translate, or would google be reliable enough? I may need it in the future!

 

german native language speaker here ::D
don't trust google translate except to get a general meaning across, and sometimes not even that.

 

Fair enough XD thank you!! I don't know how close I am to, or if in the end I'll even need it, but would I be able to PM you in the future if I need some text translated?

 

sure ::3

 

aaah thank you much! <3

 

I can talk about some stuff!

-Having severe OCD (as an 8 year old)
-Being Jewish
-Going to a Jewish School
-Being the only Jew at a Christian University
-Being sent to fat camp and all the fun that entails
-Living in Japan
-Living in Silicon Valley (AKA Computer HQ, USA)

 

This is super personal, feel free to ignore or PM or respond with an anonymous subaccount or something if you want. But, what does it feel like when you're trying to get out of an abusive living situation?

 

@TheSeer
I did it twice, and for me the experience was:
-very deep fear that the abuser would find out my plans and trap me further
-feeling like I had to guard what I said even more because of this
-I did everything in my power to discover their schedule, so I could find the ideal time to either speak surreptitiously with outside help or to leave
-I spent several weeks beforehand cleaning the whole house both times so I could surreptitiously take inventory of what I could and could not take with me
-I had to make choices about what, exactly, I'd take based on the capacity of the vehicle I'd be leaving in - anything I left, I could expect destructive retaliation from the abuser on, and I'd probably never get it back even if they didn't break it
-both times I left either while they would be out of town or when they expected me to be gone for several days, so I'd have a few days leeway to get settled in before they found out and started raising unholy hell
-for several days to weeks after, the fear of retribution lingered
-I dreaded picking up the phone to any unknown number, and I was very scared of them potentially showing up at my job, since I consistently had to be there. Neither of them knew exactly where I was employed, but they could probably find out. Luckily that didn't happen.

Feel free to PM me with more specific questions.

 

Wow, thanks so much for sharing that. That's a big help.

 

What could a person in an Early Industrial Revolution-ish fantasy world have as food she carries with her during several days in the wilderness? Like, what is it reasonable to be able to fix over a campfire. She can use potions to preserve food so she doesn't need to worry about that. The area she's in is vaguely Scandinavian, but the area she's from is vaguely North Africa, and she's been everywhere in between and more

 

Any "carry with you without refrigeration" meats are heavily salted and dried. Has been that way throughout history and into the present - hence the high value of salt in places that don't have easy access to it. For this case, fish is meat too. Vegetables dried last longer than meats without salt, but the "food value" is so low and the abundance outside of deserts make it unlikely that someone would carry them. Hardtack (biscuits) for substance food. Prior to canning dried and salted foods were the thing to carry if you didn't think you could live off the land or the generosity of the people you meet along the way, and even after canning you have to take into account the weight. It wasn't until the invention of vacuum packing and freeze-drying (late industrial revolution / modern era) that carrying decent amounts of food to go days without hunting/trading became practical.

 

Think of carrying a five pound salted ham - it will give you about 3-4 days of food value, but by the end of the third day you're questioning the smell and feel of it. And it was five pounds of carrying weight, some of which was waste - fat and/or bone (people were/are silly about preserving ham on the bone instead of ripping it off first, and the fat is important to the flavor - I has read that it has some preservative value but not in a way I would say was conclusive).

 

Once you add in "can preserve with potions" you have made it magical and the standards no longer apply.

 

resident LARPer to the rescue:
hard cheese is in general PRETTY good without being refridgerated. Carrots and small radishes don't need dried and are pretty easy to eat on the go. Really most root vegetables fall in that category. Apples are decently nutritious and can last you a while without being fridged to eat during the day, but you would want to keeo them seperate from all other fruits and vegetables. Otherwise meatpies of the oldschool variety (so with absolutely attrocious dough) were actually how meat was preserved for travels.
In generally all baked goods will be great for travelling if they are relatively dry and contain neither eggs, meat nor fish and can be packed in such a way that moisture will not get to them, but, ideally it will still be able to breathe.
Nuts are brilliant for travelling as they have a great nutritious value, are easy to eat and require next to now preparation and do not need to be kept cool.
As Lissa mentioned, [meat/fish] jerky, salted ham, dried veggies or fruit etc. are all perfectly good and are old techniques to preserve food. Smoked meats will be fine too.
If the person in question is at all used to being in the wild they will likely know how to identify edible berries, mushrooms, and have at least vague knowledge of how to fish so those are likely supplements to the diet, but not necessarily good to transport.

 

oh and technically (Honeycoated/)candied foods are also preserved for storage, but they are usually a little more difficult to carry with you during travel and wouldn't be a first pick since you can get pretty sick of sweets pretty fast and hey tend to be fast-burn-calories that don't fill for long. Dried fruit makes more sense for that

 

Also not suitable for travel, but: honey, if stored in a dry place, has a shelf life of literally forever. There are known instances of jars of honey being still edible after millenia. (though no one actually tried eating them, as far as I know)

 

While we're at it, if one is inclined towards carting around jars of something, jams, marmelades, chutneys, pickles etc are also preserved food that should be edible for a good while without refridgeration, especially sealed properly and containing enough sugar/salt/vinegar. Here the recommendation would be small jars in portion size if you're going for weeks, but if we're talking a few days at most, one big normal sized jar would likely not go bad.

 

not sure how to google this so would also appreciate relevant search terms
what happens when someone breaks bones if they are not able to move the limb at all for the next week? what happens upon impact if, say, a hammer fell on someone's arm hard enough to cause big damage? what happens in the next day? what happens if it is not splinted for a week?