Preface: this is my series of RAW and UNEDITED daily posts for NaNoWriMo. It’s going to be extremely imperfect, lauden with grammatical and spelling errors, but brimming with potential. I post it mostly for myself, but invite any daring souls to try and keep up with the winds that blow me to tomorrow :wind_face:.

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Day 99 (NaNoWriMo Part 18)

World-Class Magic

I yearn for a simple life, now moreso than ever.

But hilariously enough, it wasn’t always this way.

As a kid, we all had dreams of being in out-of-this world careers like a professional football player, a king, or an astronaut (or for the VERY valented, a football-playing-king-in-space). Little did we realize that the journey to get their would be frought with danger and obstacles the likes our childish minds could never imagine. It was fun to grow up after all, to finally have agency in our lives and forbid the treatment as childish adolecents.

For most, the dream fades away, if not immedieately then eventually. The obstacles to achieving careers would begin to loom over our small stature in our understanding of our place in the world, and slowly we begin to buckle and submit to something easier. Somthing doable, even if it’s something not enjoyable.

But for a select few, they career on, not daunted by whats coming next, but relishing the challenge of every step, because what they realize isn ot the short game, the short-term suffering, or the short-term losses to stop them from coming forward. They have dreams, dreams bigger than themselves, and the ability to see a world beyond yourself is what’s known as the coveted ability of “seeing the bigger picture”. It’s imagination into influence, action into accountabiltiy, concious desires to physical claims. It my eyes, I call that magic.

The thing about having a dream bigger than oneself, is that the dream does not exist alone. When ti expands past the domains of our mind, it intersections with the domains of others. The friction of collision is what creates a new battlefield: a battle of wills, to see who will submit before the other. If your mentality becomes your reality, the one with the stronger vision will always triump. This is what it means for your dream to be bigger than yourself.

If magic is being able to imagine something and bring it forth to reality, I would also like to indoctrinate the levels of magic available. Honestly speaking I haven’t been able to come up with something acceptable for lower forms of magic (I will imagine myself brushing my teeth, and what do you know it, it happended!), but I have a neat name for the type of magic that can affect so many people at scale that it’s insane to even try and box in the scope of their influence: world-class magic. The will and imagination to move nations.

The ability to conjure one’s own magic is something also highly disputed amongsts the most educated of scholars (thogugh they don’t call it magic: they call it inheritance and natural talent). I reuminate about this somethat often, finding myself at odds with whether I am happy with my place in life or whether I should strive more when I already have it so much better than many others in life. I also think about how oppotunitny exists in the land I reside: though the increasing wealth gap makes it hard to believe so, many people who have dreamed of becoming more than their what they are given have gone through the trials of magic-making to become their own grand magicians in their might.

Most don’t, theyr just straddle below the poverty line or maybe existing as the last remaments of the disappearting middle-class citizens. And my argument is that they don’t believe in the magic of themselves.

Evolving Arts.

It’s an idea I’m playing around, and it’s sponsored by my childhood of endlessly grinding skills in medievial-stype role-playing games. Of course mindlesly clicking around for 100s of hours will not make me any better of a REAL person (though I become an absolute force to be recokoned with in-game haha), and I wondering to myself why my childhood self was so content with spending all those frivolous hours doing nothing.

The numbers.

Each skill in the game was designated in a number, from 1-99. The first couple of levels were easy to achieve, but the grind after the first moments of glory become tedious as the next level of mastery took exponentially more time than the next (i checked, it was on an expoential curve, the madlad developers.) But the milestones were always there. Get to level 10, you can wear a cool hat. Level 20, you cann ow wear robes! Level 30, you get access to ancient arts, and so on and so forth. At at the end of the journey, were few managed to tread after thousands of hours of mindlessly skill-leveling? A mastery cape. An exclusive item only truly journeymen of the craft were allowed to flaunt. And even beyond that? Overmastery. The amount of experiene points a player accumlated would be posted on a global high score board, and the best of the best of the best loved nothing better than seeing arbitrary numbers higher than the others of their competing players.

The global high score board was just a simple webpage that refreshed once a day, but in my my youth I imagined the board to be in displayed larged and egotistical in the game’s main town square. The town square was hustling and bustling as it was the crossroads between several points of interest in the city, and players both old and new criss-crossed the busy intersection as they looked to begin their jouney and also continue aggrgative wealth and skill in it. I remember thinking how much fun the game was till this point, and how cool my character looked with their shabby wooden short sword and tiny wooden shield given out by the tutorial. Clanging by veteran players wearing some of the high level gear: I thought it was SO COOL seeing how high their player number was and what kind of armor they were wearing! Thinking on it now, it was hilarious. The armous was just a different color as the beginning armour, but because it required more skill experience to wear, it was considered prestigious. I laugh, thinking about how that same concept of prestige applied to many facet of our lives, when the material in question don’t actually “do” what something of their value implies (I am PROUD of my cheap used car, and my friends continually buy new cars that deprecate in value rapid and I scream inside, but their seems to be nothing I can do).

The illusion of grandeur was something I chased for quite a while (at the time, there was nothing better I could have been doing at the time, so I thought). When I first arrived at first major hub city of the game, I walked past the storefront displaying swords of various types of costs. At the shop, the most powerful sword was a green one worth 3200 gold. At the time, I had maybe 30 gold from slaying low-level creatures for about 30 minutes. I promised myself I would come back soon, a stronger man, and buy this sword for myself. That day arrived no later than three weeks. And when I finally got that glorious green sword… I felt nothing. I was still doing the same old thing, grinding out skill experience day after day, just in new locations with different monsters and items. The only saving grace was the candor I recieved from being oddly-efficient about the way I leveled up. I managed to get a lot of high-level materials when I was someone low leveled, other players remarked how unusual it was for someone like me ot be in the areas I was in. I reveled in it.

Thinking on it longer, I realized it do this not only for silly skill-leveling role-playing games, but a lot of facets of my life. I am too objectived-based for my own good, and it limits the scope of what I can do to what I can conciously conjure. Not world-class magic. What I reveled in was short-term success. When I did good in a game or in school, sometimes I would just stare for minutes at the scoresheet in the afterglow of the journey. I thought about all the hardships, all the struggles, and when I was feeling social, thinking of all the camaderie that it took to get to this point. But that’s just it, it was one and done. I was swaiting for someone to pick me, to test me by their own standards, and find me acceptable. I did this for the longest time, heck, I still HAVE to do this for my corporate job. It fill me with disgust when I dwell on it for too long. My magic is still not yet world-class.

Reality is broken.

Reality is broken is a piece of glarmous literature as I will call it where an author who’s name I cannot recall gushed over how much they loved videogames, kind of like I did for the majority of this piece. Their argument of their whole book was this: why DON’T we take some of the game mechanics we love, and apply it to real life?

Hmm.

As a ongoing propoent of the adolencet virtual reality technology, there are a LOT of unknowns for the way things SHOULD be in this technolgy. Many unimginative people want to replicate what’s already in physical reality into virtual reality. True… that can definetely be arranged, but if we are just extending what already exists, that’s quite a bore. I like the idea of re-contextualzing what we already know into something new. Something beautiful. Sometihng that has been lingering at the bottom of our souls, waiting for release, but never being acknowledged because it’s never the right time.

The magic in you.

Evolving Arts, for me, is going to be the bridge between fantasy magic and what I consider to be physical-world magic. There are so so many talanted people in this world who are are masters at various skills and techninque I could never hope to call my own even in several lifetimes. So I don’t, and focus on what I can do. But finding out what people are good at, is a really tricky thing to do if they aren’t extremely interactions with whatever field they embody. I know lots of friends who are extremely talented musicians, singers, writers, painters, and all of the like. Most claim that they only do it for hobby, but something about their hesittance makes me wish they knew how they could evolve their craft. Speakign to others with their works and unlock and new facet of themselves they never knew they had waiting underneath.

A modest proposal, is what I have here for you.

Evoling Arts is a concept I will create in virtual reality more-or-less tied to your mastery in an ability in both worlds. It will be quanitified based on how often you practice it, which calls to the journey and proof-of-progress I was obsesed with as a kid. It will be public or privateled measured against otheres, and othse who wish to display it as public have the option of tutoring those who are reanked underneath them for increased experience. A symbotic relationship. Help others who need to be helped, and get rewarded automatically by the game. And somewhere in between ( I love this phrase if it isn’t already apparerent), is that the actions you perfom game automatically somehow get translated into a player’s regular thinking in he physical world. Though rewarded automatically by the system I created, there are a lot of amazing experience wating to unravel just from the colliding realites of others though the underlying purpsose of trying to get better at a game, something really magical and untangible, the power of bonds.

I have a lot more work I want to put into Evolving Arts (I’m still obsessed with the notion that eyes light up when you use an EvAr skill because that is COOL), but this is a nice groundwork to start.

My world-class magic will be awakeing the magic inside others. It may not be strong enough to move a nation all at once, but it will plant the seeds to move the root of the nation, one blossoming tree at a time.

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Today’s word count: 2036 words
Total word count until today: 37,865 words

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