It turns out that James's object relates to a stash of cloak-pins that have been gathered up into the knights' hall that Father Christmas restored. There are berry pins and leaf pins and flower pins, and James's investigations turns up their features: if, with her new present, she knights someone into the corresponding Order and they take suitable oaths of service, they will be able to wear a corresponding pin - otherwise quite bafflingly impossible. These pins can be recognized from farther away than their actual visible details ought to allow.
James's staff permits her to find all of them, where "all of them" begins by being just the pile of them in the Hall but later, as the dwarves reverse-engineer the designs on her order, come to be a larger quantity - and "finding" comes to have more information, including whether they are assigned to knights, whether those knights are alive, whether they are wearing their pins, and whether they have had their pins stolen. Each sort of pin has different effects. The leaves offer strength and durability, slight but useful; the berries make their wearers hardier and less easily exhausted; and the flowers improve the senses. The staff also has a distant communication function like Isabella's scepter, but while the scepter only works on friends, the staff only works on knights who have their pins on. The knights cannot hear each other, which means that while many simultaneous conversations are possible, it is most useful for one-to-one interactions or one-to-many announcements. It also technically has spying applications, but no knights sign on expecting to be wearing their cloak-pins like wires, and there are no particularly urgent targets.
Isabella's bookshelf is useful too. It will not appear more than one copy of a given text at a time, but they don't resist being copied, so she makes the bookshelf available for visitors' use and has copies scribed out of long-lost tomes. She is able to retrieve old favorite novels from Earth - but not, alas, anything so vague as "an engineering textbook" or "an introduction to physics". It might well have ruined the entire aesthetic of the kingdom, anyway (who knows if the physics are even the same in a country so pervasively magical?), and the people are happy and everything is stable; she doesn't lose too much sleep over not having the means to easily start an industrial revolution.
Acorn (who now has six kittens at home, but can make fewer and faster business trips with his cornucopia now that he has just about his pick of fast creatures to ride and now that everyone has farms) solicits a berry pin when he hears of the knightly orders' restoration.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2014-06-30 01:53 am (UTC)It turns out that James's object relates to a stash of cloak-pins that have been gathered up into the knights' hall that Father Christmas restored. There are berry pins and leaf pins and flower pins, and James's investigations turns up their features: if, with her new present, she knights someone into the corresponding Order and they take suitable oaths of service, they will be able to wear a corresponding pin - otherwise quite bafflingly impossible. These pins can be recognized from farther away than their actual visible details ought to allow.
James's staff permits her to find all of them, where "all of them" begins by being just the pile of them in the Hall but later, as the dwarves reverse-engineer the designs on her order, come to be a larger quantity - and "finding" comes to have more information, including whether they are assigned to knights, whether those knights are alive, whether they are wearing their pins, and whether they have had their pins stolen. Each sort of pin has different effects. The leaves offer strength and durability, slight but useful; the berries make their wearers hardier and less easily exhausted; and the flowers improve the senses. The staff also has a distant communication function like Isabella's scepter, but while the scepter only works on friends, the staff only works on knights who have their pins on. The knights cannot hear each other, which means that while many simultaneous conversations are possible, it is most useful for one-to-one interactions or one-to-many announcements. It also technically has spying applications, but no knights sign on expecting to be wearing their cloak-pins like wires, and there are no particularly urgent targets.
Isabella's bookshelf is useful too. It will not appear more than one copy of a given text at a time, but they don't resist being copied, so she makes the bookshelf available for visitors' use and has copies scribed out of long-lost tomes. She is able to retrieve old favorite novels from Earth - but not, alas, anything so vague as "an engineering textbook" or "an introduction to physics". It might well have ruined the entire aesthetic of the kingdom, anyway (who knows if the physics are even the same in a country so pervasively magical?), and the people are happy and everything is stable; she doesn't lose too much sleep over not having the means to easily start an industrial revolution.
Acorn (who now has six kittens at home, but can make fewer and faster business trips with his cornucopia now that he has just about his pick of fast creatures to ride and now that everyone has farms) solicits a berry pin when he hears of the knightly orders' restoration.