Alec does a lot of odd jobs around the Avalon, and going to odd places to find unclaimed medallions for Madam U is one of them. He likes, it he gets paid to dig around in stuff that belongs to dead people, it’s bliss.
The Skin Deep Pin Club is open! This quarter’s theme is the LIVERPOOL AVALON, and come August all members will get two enamel pins based off Liverpool Avalon storefronts, and an EMBROIDERED PATCH of the Underground sign! I’ve never done embroidered patches before, so I’m really excited about this one! Click here for more information on how to join the Pin Club!
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So, is Mme U. driving a hearse?
That’s probably Alec’s car, just because that seems like the type of car a bugbear would demand to drive. I’m pretty sure all bugbears are related to Ray Stanz.
“I see a hearse; I drive a hearse.”
Hearse drivers? Totally bugbears.
I feel like that’d specifically be an Alec car… But then again, I may be no bugbear but I’d drive a hearse, too, if I could drive!
The economics of medallions makes no sense. Hear me out:
Medallions stopped being made in the middle ages, but the human population has been steadily growing at a geometric rate. Even if the mythical population grew at half or even a tenth of that rate there wouldn’t be anywhere near enough medallions to go around. All of this implies mythical reproduction is extremely slow, or mythical inheritance is a very iffy thing (AKA Sam), or there are a lot of unturned false humans running around out there, or mythical inheritance can and does skip multiple generations. All of which raise even more questions. So I’m going to stop thinking about this now and just accept what Jim says: “Tadaa! Magic.”
> or there are a lot of unturned false humans running around out there
Back when Tony was introduced to the LA, Madame U seemed somewhat insistent that “humans” found to be mythical-friendly would regularly turn out to actually be unknowing unturned. Also, places for people to live in an avalon are capped, and mythicals forced to live really among humans all the time are more likely than our LA-resident crew to find the idea of “maybe better to spare your kids all this hassle?” appealing. I sorta can see the unturned outnumbering the medallioned by now – though I admit that I’d also expect a significant number of “never could get a medallion for me” living in the LA, alongside the monsters …
What JoB said, and then a significant portion of the mythical population has inherent shapeshifting/glamor/illusion magic, no medallions needed.
Pretty sure the case is there are a lot of unturned who will never know their heritage. The whole point of medallions was to be able to disperse and hide among humans, after all. Avalons large enough to house actual communities are a massive outlier, not the norm.
I suspect Pilgrim and JoB are essentially correct. Kory has said, long ago, that mythics, unturned or not, do not outnumber humans, as some readers were speculating. She specifically said that the mythical species are vastly outnumbered by humans, even after so many centuries of secret propagation.
Which is not to say that mythics are dwindling. That varies; there are a lot of satyrs, but apparently not many sphinxes. But since no medallions have been made for eight hundred years, it’s almost certain that there are not enough for all the mythics who don’t know they need them. There does seem to be about enough for those who do know.
When a mythic, turned or not, has children with a human, those offspring /can/ be either mythic or human. Story details suggest that mythic identity tends to be dominant to some degree, but if humanity is a totally recessive trait, they would have been seriously outnumbered by now.
Does anyone out there know enough statistics to ballpark the numbers and bracket the parameters?
> When a mythic, turned or not, has children with a human, those offspring /can/ be either mythic or human.
And if the mother and the child are mythicals (and mom has a medallion), mom’s supposedly able to decide what the newborn’s going to look like by picking her own form, which – as far as the outward appearance faced with a lack of extra medallions is concerned – shoots the applicability of statistics right in the head. :-3 I’m tempted to say that game theory is likely to take its place instead …
My what happens when someone who has a medallion has to go into an MRI machine or has an emergency. Can other people remove the medallion form the wearer?
I believe a previous question said that could be a couple meters away without issue.
Unfortunately, “a couple meters” also is how far “metal” must be kept away from an MRI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_magnetic_resonance_imaging#Projectile_risk
On the other hand, that goes for ferromagnetic materials only, and we don’t know what metals were used to make medallions; namely, copper, brass, tin, gold, and silver (as well as lead and HoweverYouSpellTheFullNameOf”Al” ;-) would’ve been lucky choices by the back-then sphinxes.
There isn’t likely to be much aluminum/aluminium in any of the old medallions unless a mythic alchemist was far and away ahead of mundane metallurgical chemists/alchemists. That metal went from theory to expensive luxury to cheap & plentiful material in about a century. Of course, that century happened /after/ the sphinxes stopped making medallions and went into hiding.
From the research I’ve done, I think a Cu/Al bronze might be a good choice for new medallions. It’s durable, and resistant to salt corrosion.