I'm Not Done With Kaori

Reminder: This this whole thing came about because I watched Encanto too much, which means you absolutely are allowed to sing that title to "We Don't Talk About Bruno" - tho, if the giant woman didn't give it away, I'm more of a "Surface Pressure" guy myself.

Precocizing a minor character was meant as an exercise to get my brain working while it was snagged on projects I needed to do, and then it worked better than expected. But I'm not following up because I like anthro Kaori's design. (I think it’s rad, but the change is new, so my brain still shows her human form.) It's because designing her made me think about her scenes, and suddenly she became REAL. Whoa, she does more than I thought in this story!

Let's be clear, she's still a "no last name, no backstory" minor character, but she has two things going for her that jumps her above the mass of extras:

1) She has a specific role. She lives at the big magic Academy and takes readings of emerging mages’ potential. She's also the contact for the so-removed-from-society-folks-don’t-think-they’re-real elite mage network, and her job is to flag anyone with potential - be it raw power or having a magic profile that enables a useful ability. And the plot at this moment is that the main questees have learned they're being fate-altered to get new abilities that’d help them shape the future. So Kaori'd be doing things here even if she were just a non-mage evaluator. But she’s an elite contact.

2) Her scenes happen at the end/beginning of Momentum "books." And the end of each book features a council member - the elite of elite - interaction. (Remember the first Kaori post, when she recruited eventual-council member Charlotte? It’s adult Charlotte’s turn in book three.) And think more on this… Momentum is meant to be an episodic show, with largely self-contained stories until the big things coming at the bookends. Since Momentum is my scrap paper, I intentionally forget the episodes once I'm done playing with a story idea. (If you factor in how I've long lost my notes on the other key points - the adventures that end in them finding the stones the quest is after - like, 99% of Momentum’s plot doesn't really exist.) But I *do* have loose outlines for the bookend plots, and that means Kaori's moments are in my head! She's a key players in the Aaron/Rhenna storyline. Once she became real, and I looked deeper, this is where I found that bigger role than I expected! Details I had never bothered to think about now drew my focus, and it was fascinating to see it come together the same way it always had - but this time I was paying attention.

What you see in the banner image is a result one of those moments that surprised me. Kaori summoned the two who were mages going in to the quest for their reading, channeler Aaron (who can connect to another mage and sense their powers) and refresher Rhenna (who can energize you fully after you’re drained, or stun you). They did NOT want to cooperate, because the feedback loop created by their complimentary powers has been pushed to levels that could get them in trouble with the elite network. (These two both dodged the magic school system to go to a standard university. They used private tutors - which means they got the basics from someone, then learned on their own, thus diving into areas that’d be discouraged in standard mage education.)

Fighting back against the reading isn't really an option - and this is beyond the comedic scene above. Kaori declared she would get a reading of them both at once. Profiling two mages at once is not supposed to be a thing, for obvious result contamination reasons. And she'd only ask if she already knew what those two “cheaters” have done.

Aaron is resigned to his fate, but a key part of Rhenna's backstory is she got an incorrect reading when younger, which caused her all kinds of frustration, and started her viciousness about not suffering fools who’d hold her back. (Being a full silver - she's in grayscale when she should be a redhead/red fox, as something with magic can affect hair pigmentation in this universe - they knew she was gonna be a mage, and rushed the diagnosis before her potential had fully emerged. She wasted her early teens following a healer path.) There's some double triggering going on there with Rhenna.

This is when the Aaron/Rhenna story hits a major point. I knew the Academy arc was when the two were warned about what they had gotten into, and where their obsession was taking them, but I had mentally given the conversation to Charlotte, as this book’s visiting council member (here is where I point out my dislike of high magic fantasy taking center stage is showing, because I never gave any group or the whole elite organization a proper name) - as Charlotte's the one who finishes the conversation, leading to Rhenna officially (finally!) leaving the party at the end of book three. (Becoming Kaori's roommate during her extended time at the Academy! Which I had totally glossed over before, to skip to the next stage of Rhenna's story! I mean, Rhenna was probably teaching there for a while after book three's booting, which is probably interesting and has tons of comedic potential, and I simply did not care enough to look into it!)

If KAORI is the one who gives Aaron and Rhenna the warning - in the uncomfortable moment of mapping out exactly how deep the two have gotten in weaving their skills together - a special avenue opens up: Kaori's job is to file reports on what she finds. The elites trust her evaluations and suggestions. But Kaori doesn't HAVE to tell Charlotte everything, meaning these three can sit down, isolated in the evaluation chamber, which is shielded and secure, and have a very frank and honest discussion. Which is very interesting to me! 

It's also a topless talk, because evaluation means setting a sheet of magic-resonant stones on a person's back, to map out what their skills are. And this particular sessions requires diving deep into how the two interact, and how it'd show up in the stone reading. This is how the important conversation has to play out! (Now you know why I was drawing Rhenna in bikini stuff. At least I was kind and let her change into pants before it all went down.)

See why I put off making this post until I had the banner sketch drawn? This reading chamber sketch, while a travesty of perspective, covers a canon moment - in the book version of the story, that is, which is not necessarily the way it'd play out in the Precociousverse cartoon - but it’d kinda feel like funky jazz is about to play if you saw this image without context. (Hmm. Now that I think about it, sexy times WOULD be a valid method to evaluate the feedback loop the two have, but that wouldn't get pass the board of standards and practices, isn't my “accidentally wrote the ace-est story” style, and we're not gonna hurt Nate like that!)

Anyway, this is where we nail down Aaron's arc, how he fully devoted his life to the quest, and his win-at-all-costs attitude will burn him if he tries to have everything - such as keeping the uninvited Rhenna in the group. As for Rhenna, there's a *reason* she's been able to make a mockery of the rules set down. She should be dead fifty times over, because the quest team isn’t meant to use outside help, and penalties are meant to be severe for that, and this is the time to get a full evaluation to see how much of Rhenna’s protection is from how the two experimented so much they can loophole into counting as one person, and narrow down how much of that is Aaron's quest-boosted power, and how much is Rhenna. 

(Spoiler: It's a LOT Rhenna, which is why the elites want to recruit her instead of stomping her out for cheating. And why the bookend plots, when the councilmembers get involved, all have a focus on the Aaron/Rhenna relationship. Oh, I have a whole thesis on this stuff and how it came to be, but I won't be going into that yet. Heck, I'm supposed to drop a few paragraphs here about how I'm starting to finally find a happy spot with Aaron's magic, as I never liked him being a mage, but I'm out of energy. We'll cover that in the future, ok? Someone nudge me about if you actually care. I kinda assume no one reads the text, since most of my writing here is a rambling fugue state, thanks to disability limitations melting my brain, and, duh, I still haven't given y'all the background info to care about any of this! That’s the project I meant to work on instead of this post, but with my brain I will go with whatever I can do when a window opens.)