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Obverse & Reverse Ch6 Page 29

Obverse & Reverse Ch6 Page 29 published on 42 Comments on Obverse & Reverse Ch6 Page 29

Edit: OOPS I messed up and somehow scheduled TWO pages to go up this week! If you haven’t read the last page, hit back! There are two new pages! It’s a Halloween miracle!

It’s tough to talk to your kids about the unkindnesses inherent in modern society. Especially if you are in a huge mansion built by hereditary wealth when you have to do it, lol.

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42 Comments

Hopefully Michelle will learn how to make medliions. I dont know if it will completely remove the stigma but it’s a start.

Will things actually get better, though? It was apparently hard enough for two sphinxes to keep up with a local demand, and we expect one to make thousands or millions of them? And when push comes to shove, what then? Is that Michelle will be to them, a medallion making factory? It’s not tenable.

Two spinxes hand crafting medallions with medieval methods vs one sphinx with all the resources of a post-industrial society, the backing of a wealthy and influential family, no incentive to keep the secrets within the tribe, a deep personal interest in reducing internecine violence amongst her fellow mythicals, and probably the support of human and demihuman sorcerers like Tim and Samhain?

The seed has been planted. Keep hold of that dream Lorne.

I would say that the question is how are the medallion blanks enchanted?
If they can be batch magicked in groups- the most likely scenario, as I see no other way to keep up with demand- then making the blanks in the first place is the bottleneck.
We won’t know until the making process is approached in the story…But speaking as an actual craftsman for a living, being able to enchant a batch of blanks all at once is an attractive idea if it works.

The initial enchantment goes into the actual smelting of the metals by putting them through a very magical phoenix egg. That creates the material AND binds it with some powerful magics that the sphynx then manipulate into Medallion Powers.

That would imply that metal was smelted in large batches at the location of the egg, and then shipped out as ingots or planchettes to sphinxes making medallions wherever their shops happened to be.
If thats the case, its a bit clumsy and would make medallion production back in the day very slow.
How many total medallions are in the world as a result?
The smelting method implies only a few thousand, with the number depending entirely on how many sphinxes, and how long were they at work before the dragon war that wiped them out?
I make hand crafted items such as custom knives, swords, wheellock rubber band guns, armour and jewelry items for a living, so I am quite curious about the process.

If you go back to the callback link I posted, it appears that they smelted and made some blanks at the egg via pour mold.

And that they made 30 medallions per run.

The egg seems to be no larger than a watermelon.

Assuming they used only one sand table per pour, yes.
I had forgotten the panel showing the casting before.
I wonder how hot the egg gets when you do this?
How long does it take to melt down a full load of metal?
How much metal per pour? Several pounds at least, from what we can see.

As it was near their unprotected paws, I’d have to say either only hot enough to melt the material, or the sphynx power makes them able to withstand heat that smelts ore.

And we don’t know. It’s more than just the melting, the metal presumably has to be able to absorb the magics, and who knows how long THAT takes.

Rereading through that Illuminations chapter also answers my earlier question. What’s to stop Ravi from temporarily ‘creating’ other sphinxes to make more medallions, since I’m sure he’d have the power to do that? The rest of the immortals. He earned a ‘go to your room and think about what you’ve done’ for messing with Phineas and the phoenix egg; there would be a cosmic netherealm to pay if he were to interfere again on a world-altering scale.

Except they’re still limited by the SOLE phoenix egg. They’d need more to mass-produce the required metal materials.

And if the process to change the raw magic of the phoenix egg into usable medallion power relies on Sphynx Power, then all it means is that Michelle has a larger stack at her side.

This suggests that with access to the more efficient modern smelting equipment you could create larger batches of unformatted medallions. The question is how many she can ‘format’ with the final spells at one time. The sphinxes are always going to be the bottle neck but part of the slowdown in the past would be the fact that they would be limited to fairly small scale smelting and casting hardware only able to produce a couple medallions at a time. If not having to hand produce a new casting master and mold for every single medallion.

Its all a question of the setup and the supply of raw materials, isn’t it?
Speaking from experience, once you get a batch of metal melted and up to pour temperature, you can run off puddle style blanks quite quickly.
The limiting factor is the amount of molten metal and room for enough sand table cavities to handle all of it.
The metal has to sit and cool for a while before it can be removed from whatever you are using for moulds.
if you have, say, 500 pounds of metal in small pieces for melting, you can just run a fresh crucible by putting it back to maintain heat after its poured out, and add more fresh material.
You could make several hundred to several thousand blanks in a day with a little assistance, since you apparently do not need to burn fuel for the heat you need with a phoenix egg.

But…WHY are Bandersnatches considered monsters to begin with by the other members of the Avalons?

Griffins, dragons, sphinxes, Nemean lions–these are all monsters by human standards, too! It’s rather speciesist of the Avalonians to consider bandersnatches monsters when Eleanor has exhibited no worse behavior than any other child.

They just weren’t around when they were handing out the medallions. The word “monster” in this society has a very specific meaning.

Yikes. If Greg had totally busted his medallion instead of just fried it slightly, would he have been then classified as a “monster?”

I think “monster” is a group classification, rather than an individual one. Like… “hispanic.” It denotes that you belong to a group, not necessarily that you have specific features as an individual.

Sphynx are not monsters. Gryphons are not monsters. Nemean lions are not monsters.

Bandersnatches are. Manticores are.

They have no medallions to hide them as human, and they do not have the ability to hide amongst humans naturally.

And them being seen by a human not in the know is bad for everyone.

Lorne just found a literal child his age that’s stuck living alone in the woods and had never even been inside a house before and the adult is like “Don’t worry about it”

That adult grew up with a brother who is a Jub-Jub bird, and Jub-Jub birds are considered just as nasty as the bandersnatches in a certain poem, said poem being taken very seriously by the Wonderlanders. I think Mary knows probably quite well what racism is. She just doesn’t want to hurt Lorne.

Awww. Someone has a very good heart. <3

It's too bad Michelle will never make medallions because a certain crazy ancient dragon doesn't want them because he's a bitter old crow (who breaths fire).

And now we get to the rationalization that prejudice always has. In this case, it’s some form of

“Certain species don’t have medallions because the sphinxes judged that those species were too dangerous and too likely to do harm, to be trusted with them. Living among humans would quickly become untenable if our method of doing so also made the predators indistinguishable, until the moment of another murder, from the prey. If the monsters start using this shapeshifty power to kill people, it can never remain secret and we’d have all that blood on our hands for being part of it.

And while Eleanor may be a perfectly nice Bandersnatch who wouldn’t abuse a medallion in that way, if there were Bandersnatch medallions you’d have the eeeeevil Bandersnatches who would just use them to lure humans out to where they can kill and eat them.

See, dear, Eleanor’s not like other Bandersnatches. She’s one of the good ones…..”

Have. Heard. Other. Versions. Of. This. TOO MANY TIMES!!!

Answering Eala Dubh about Ravi just making temporary spinxes:
If medallions were that simple to make, Ravi or someone else would have thought of it and done it already. Either they are incapable of doing it or are not allowed to with such sufficiently powerful prohibition that none of them dared to risk it or could not do it if they wanted to. Which amount to the same thing.

Consider also that you don’t just need to be a sphinx but have access to their appropriate ancestral memory, so a species-change isn’t enough. Familial bonds may also be a factor if other stuff isn’t. Then there is the question of rebuilding.

Also consider that if they were anywhere easy, there is no lacking of incentive to make them if anyone else could replicate the results. Anyone who could make medallions would be rolling in it.

Yes, Illuminations chapter 3 basically confirms that Ravi is the equivalent of a rogue Time Lord but there are boundaries even he cannot cross, and that the other Yakshas’ non-intervention policy would quash any attempt from any other quarter to attempt a similar stunt.

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