Keeper of the Lost Cities Thoughts

Thoughts About Abilities: Part 1

This chart shows my best guess for how many known characters have each ability. It does not depict how "common" the ability is. I tried to make the slices different enough colors from each other.

Now I'm going to say some random things about abilities.

Beguiler:

This seems like a tricky ability to have. It's a lot more subtle than Mesmer, so you would have a lot of difficulty proving that you didn't illegally use your ability. You could get in a lot of trouble just because someone was feeling strong emotions around you.

I'm pretty sure that beguiling doesn't directly affect someone's behavior. Your words just influence people's emotions, and their emotions in turn affect their behavior.

Though, I'm not quite sure how this ability is useful, unless you want to do something underhanded and manipulative. I guess you could calm down a crowd of freaking out people, but I suspect that if someone's already feeling strong emotion, it would be a lot more difficult for a Beguiler to affect them.

I find it a little concerning that there's a Beguiler on the Council. Them picking someone to join them who can influence people to feel whatever she wants them to seems a little suspicious. Alina honestly hasn't done much with her ability yet, but I suggest we keep an eye on her.

Charger:

Summoning lightning doesn't seem like the most useful ability, except in a battle situation. But the Lost Cities aren't supposed to have battle situations (even though they do). Luckily, charging is electricity, not just lightning. A Charger could literally shove some electricity into a gadget to charge it without having to plug it in. That seems kind of useful, except we don't know for sure how widely electricity is used in the Lost Cities.

Though this would be a handy ability in the Forbidden Cities, as long as you had good control and avoided frying your gadgets instead of charging them.

There's a Charger on the Council. Why? Did the Council expect they'd need to zap people, or do they just want to have the option?

Conjurer:

This one seems so useful. As long as you know where something is, you can put it literally anywhere you want. You don't necessarily need to conjure it to your hand. You'd never need to pack ever again! It'd also be useful for stealing stuff, not that elves usually do that sort of thing. But you could!

There's a Conjurer on the Council. Why do so many of the Councilors have abilities that are early on this alphabetical list.

And apparently Lady Gisela is a Conjurer. Why hasn't she stolen stuff? That seems like something she'd do.

I suspect Conjurer is one of the more common, underestimated abilities because it's so practical and the elves don't seem very into "practical." Okay, the real reason is because Mr. Forkle said something about Conjurers rarely being seen as threats. But it's really awesome.

Descryer:

At first, I was shocked by how unuseful this ability was. Sensing people's potential? You could do that with an educated guess. Especially if it's known for being "inaccurate" and "vague" and "you have to live up to your potential for this to be accurate."

Then, I realized that might have been the point. Descryer seems like a really easy ability to fake. Not that I'm accusing Terik of anything, but all you'd have to do is guess and if you're wrong, just say that potential is vague.

Especially since everyone has potential for a lot of things. Sensing people's potential seems a bit too much like fortune telling to really fit in the Lost Cities. Just think for a moment about the sheer number of things you could do right now. Does Terik only sense a few pieces of your potential? Which ones? Tam's shadowvapor thing was kind of explained: he's not sensing how evil you are, he's sensing how many secrets you have, and the more you're trying to hide, the more likely it is that you're going to do something that you don't want other people to know. It's still confusing, but it makes more sense than Descrying.

Finally, I'll mention something that might officially bring you over to the "Terik is faking his ability" side: At Fintan's healing, right before everything got set on fire and fell apart (literally and figuratively), Terik said that Fintan had no potential for danger.

Like, what?

Yes, Oralie suggested that Fintan's emotions might be affecting Terik's reading, but I honestly don't see quite how that would work. I'm suspicious.

Empath:

Fifth Councilor ability in a row! Like, what?

This ability seems weaker than it should. I don't quite guess why an Empath needs to be touching someone to do a reading. People can figure out other people's emotions relatively accurate without touching them. I know I can tell when people around me are stressed or upset definitely not without touching them.

I feel like it should work more like this: you can sense the emotions of people around you without touching them, but to really tune in on a specific person, you need physical contact. Otherwise, it's harder to tell which emotions belong to which person.

Sensing people's emotions sounds really overwhelming, but also like a power that's a lot more useful than, say, mind-controlling people.

The next part will be about Enhancer, Flasher, Fluctuator, Froster, and Guster.