Dragaera

Not a witch?

Joy Jennifer Nicholson jjnichol at MIT.EDU
Mon Jan 23 14:34:47 PST 2006

I'm about a month behind on the conversation, but wasn't it
established in Phoenix that there were two different types of stones?
In their testing at the end of Phoenix, I thought only one affected
the link between Vlad and Loiosh.  Hopefully the other one is the one
that's preventing people from finding him via sorceress means (and
prevented people from teleporting out of the jails, if I remember
correctly).   Has he been carrying them both around?  I thought he
just had the Gold ones on him.

 
> Jose Marquez <jhereg69 at earthlink.net> 
> Sent by: dragaera-bounces at dragaera.info
> 01/11/06 09:01 PM
> 
> To
> Dragaera <dragaera at dragaera.info>
> cc
> 
> Subject
> Re: Not a witch?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> >There is more than one type of psychic communication. Vlad and Loiosh 
> >can communicate clearly despite the Phoenix Stones' disruption of 
> >psychic/sorcerous energy, due to the familiar/witch bond. Nobody can 
> 
> Yeah, well, I've always seen this as a case of plot convenience, more than 
> anything else, since Brust never explains how a witch/familiar bond is 
> different from normal psychic contact.
> 
> There was an internal decision-making process  that said, "I need a way to 
> shield Vlad from Psychic energy to hide him from the Jhereg, but I need to 
> keep up the ongoing conversations between him and Loiosh while I do so."
> 
> And rather than explaining a contrived difference between Vlad/Loiosh's 
> conversations and normal psychic ones, Brust simply notes that there *is* 
> a difference of some kind, and moves along. 
> 
> This is not a criticism. In fact, it's a rather elegant way of preventing 
> a piece of fairly meaningless minutae from getting in the way of a good 
> story.
> 
> However, this is one example of where the books cross out of Science 
> Fiction (which generally offers explanations for things) into true Fantasy 
> (which does not). 
> 
> >contact Vlad or even trace him using psionics/psychics because of the 
> >disruptive field. It also causes him to be unable to contact others. I 
> >don't remember what the results of Sethra's experiments showed regarding 
> >the properties of Phoenix Stones.
> 
> No results of this were ever offered to the reader, so it's not surprising 
> that you don't remember them. ;-)
> 
> Majikjon
> 
>