Prism Aegis (Proposed)
Hi. This page [sometimes] contains WIP proposals for review only. This is not the actual Prism Aegis theme page.
Cosmology
Magic has many sources, many places from which it springs, and many places to which it goes.
Overlapping the world we live in, there's a plane of magic and energy called Spectra, known to some as the Plane of Color. To mundane human eyes, Spectra is visible only as color, as a physical characteristic of the objects they see and interact with on a daily basis. But what Spectra truly is and does is so much more.
Beyond its visible aspect, Spectra is filled with flows of energy created by the hopes and emotions of every person, invisible to almost everyone, even out of reach of the world's great magicians, who draw their power from other sources. This "Color Energy" is not the sole source of human feeling, but it is a necessary ingredient, and to a rob a person of it is to rob them of what makes them human: their feelings, dreams, and imagination. Likewise, negative emotions affect Spectra too, creating currents of "Gray Energy." Gray energy expresses itself on Earth as darkness or shadow, making color less vivid, or in the most extreme cases, rendering objects entirely colorless.
Normally, color energy and gray energy exist in balance, not only within Spectra but within each person. Even generally happy or sad people, after all, have their ups and downs, and on the whole, the world exists in emotional balance. But there are exceptions. One rarely sees massive groups of people who are universally happy, but in times of turmoil and strife, the opposite can happen. Great wars and disasters often result in massive outpourings of fear, suffering, and other negative human emotions, and in moments like those, sometimes the already porous barrier between Spectra and the Earth starts to develop large holes.
The present is one such time. In today's Tokyo, with its already blurred lines between the mundane and magical world, with its unseen magical battles and the resulting strong emotions, the barrier has thinned, even broken in places. And this is not a good thing.
Spectra is not only a plane of energy. Though they're extremely rare, and they normally have no substance or ability to directly affect Earth, there are beings living there. But it might be inaccurate to think of them as people; they're more akin to static, primal forces. They might not have learned to feel or think anything at all, were it not for our effect on them. Nearly all denizens of Spectra are Motes, beings of color who ride the energy waves of human emotions and aspirations, feeling what we feel, sharing in our hopes and goals. Through this experience, they understand us, empathize with us, and as such, wish to see us prosper. Though they have no permanent shape or name within their own world--each one instead comprising a single shade of color--as a whole, they are known as the Dream. And though no mote has ever seen or heard her, they believe the Dream is ruled over by a being called Aura.
Opposite them is the Nightmare, a group comprised of beings of gray energy called Shades. Unlike motes, shades are not intelligent, nor does each one correspond to a particular shade of color. They're also not evil, not in the human conception of the term, even if they can be confused, angry, and violent when they're allowed to run amok on Earth. Instead, they're simply animalistic clusters of negative human emotion, and they are created and destroyed naturally as negative feelings, and thus gray energy, ebbs and flows. Most of the time, shades are simply a reality of Spectra, harming neither motes or humans.
But the Nightmare definitely has a ruler, and that ruler has made herself known, both now and in the past. Most of the time, her touch is not felt. In fact, most of the time, she doesn't exist. But when the barriers between Earth and Spectra weaken and there's an abundance of gray energy flowing in, Nox comes into existence. Nox is a being of vast power, and unlike the Dream, she does not understand, or want to understand, humanity. Instead, she feels only the jealousy, rage, loneliness, and hatred which drive the worst of humanity's actions, and driven by those emotions, she seeks only to extinguish the Dream, all color energy, and the humans who create it.
But even Nox cannot act directly. Like all beings of Spectra, she has no substance, and she cannot directly affect either the Earth or the other denizens of Spectra. So she instead releases seeds of pure gray energy into the Earth, and these seeds are naturally attracted to those whose hearts are tormented by their own negative feelings. These people do not know the source of their power, but being filled with the same energy that drives Nox and creates her feelings, they eventually come to share her motives; they eventually want to use their newfound gray magic to drain the world of color energy. Eventually, the most powerful of these people find that shades are attracted to them, crossing through the holes between Spectra and Earth, instinctively doing the bidding of their new masters. And among those select few, there's invariably a single person, usually the first chosen, who rises as the leader of this gray army and starts to develop a link to Nox herself.
It's a destructive cycle, though. Being suffused with gray energy amplifies one's negative feelings, and the more of their power they call upon, the more they lose themselves.
And the Dream, wishing to preserve balance and protect humanity, but equally unable to act directly, invariably sends fragments of its own power to Earth in the form of crystals, to empower to fight for humanity. These seeds of energy, lacking substance or the ability to exist without a human context, seek a human experience around which to take shape. But there's no intelligence behind this decision. Instead, the more powerful the imagination and emotions behind that experience, the more it resonates with their given type of energy, the more likely it is to be chosen.
In the latest instance of this struggle, in which the Prism Keepers fight Griselda and her minions to save Tokyo and the world, the breach through which these energies poured happened to be on the grounds of Seishou Public School, at the foot of a particular Japanese Lilac tree. And the experiences which resonated most strongly there were those created by the imaginary games of Mei and her friends. It had heroic archetypes and stories of friendship, but more than that, the experience of playing out that world came with its own, very real struggle, one of betrayal and heartbreak as former friends turned against each other.
Dream Sequences
One of the major themes of Prism Aegis is that it's a story of friends who come from normal backgrounds. That's why the major players in the cosmology cannot act directly: I want the story to stay about the girls, rather than any of the powerful magical players in the background. I want the story to feel like it's about the girls foremost, and that they're tied together by fate. I even try to play Griselda as just barely out of the emotional reach of the protagonists. She may be inarguably mean and inarguably a bully; she'll go for verbal gutpunches that will earn deserved hate without hesitation, after all. Despite this, I try to make it feel like there's the tiniest sliver of good in her because I don't want the emotional connection between her and the PK's to die. She was once the PK's good friend, and I want there to be a vague feeling that she can be again, even if she's loathed by them in the moment.
I bring up connections because that's the underlying thematic reason for what I'm about to ask for. I want to run occasional dream sequences. The first type will be rather common within the majou shoujo genre: shared dreams. The canonical justification is simply the magical bond the protagonists and even Griselda share. Sometimes, especially in times of stress, they reach out to each other in their sleep and get tiny glances (always in hard-to-decipher abstracts) of what the others are feeling.
The second type is a bit more atypical. As outlined above, this is not the first generation of Prism Keepers. In fact, the Prism Crystals of the first generation is are still around, scattered in remote places (they're powerless now since the previous generation is dead, mostly from old age). Near the end of the first arc, I want the protagonists to find one. If they can find these old crystals and take them to the right place (a place of emotional significance for that person), I want to run a second type of dream sequence: reliving some of the memories of the previous generation.
This will partially be done as a plot mechanic to clue the protagonists into some of the cosmological secrets that are hidden from them at the start of Act 1. It will also be a chance to inject some interesting historical flavor into the theme. As said above, the Prism Keepers arise in times of great emotional imbalance. The previous generation in this proposal were actually in Japan too (convenient!), and they were young girls living during the final desperate months of WW2, with Japan starved by a blockade and under constant siege from the air.
They wouldn't be fighting in the war or anything like that. They'd just by young girls trying to survive and fight their magical battles amidst the backdrop of the misery of war. I don't want this to turn into a parallel campaign that narratively hijacks the theme, and I do think these sequence would thematically be a little dark, so I would use this device sparingly. I just want it as a revelatory window that serves as a learning experience for the protagonists, as well as an interesting interlude to break up the usual structure of a theme that largely deals with previously mundane young girls.
REIKO NOTE: Hiroko stated that she thought the WW2 stuff was indeed 'a little too dark' after some major thought on it. We'll probably come up with something else. I def. like the idea of Prism Keepers being 'legacy' mahou shoujo however.
Reiko's Statements and Musings
This section is for Reiko player to muse on this as Theme Contact.
It seems that Mint more or less approved this already and we didn't notice:
Mint Chip added on Sat Jan 30 13:29:26 2016: I like it a lot, actually. My only actual concern is that some of the words and terms are already used - nightmare is an organization, UMBRA is a group, etc.
...and more or less made the same statements I did about it.. that Nightmare, UMBRA were all terms being used already. So we need to change those up.
I already spoke to you about the tone issues, and I trust you not to get too dour and dark-- but still 'keep things real' too like you want. I want you to give people the ability to 'opt out of this' part-- I know Keeper Purple has concerns about this. I however, am looking forward to it.
One thing to add. I totally want PKs to be princesses of Spectra or something. I may really just wanna be 'Actually an orange princess.' >,> X3
