The magical system in the worlds of A Thousand Auras is based around a light sci-fi substance called "lush". Lush is made up of grain-of-sand-sized supercomputers that come from the only known universe where humanity is largely communistic. The supercomputers can cling to each other like magnets, or be separated. They can be manipulated by hand like clay, but the best results come from just thinking about the form you want them to take. So, if you're hungry, you can turn a ball of lush into a hamburger and eat it. And it will taste exactly how you imagined, if not better.
The limitation of form is based on how much lush you have. So if you had a fist-sized lump of lush, that's how big the hamburger could be. If you had a mountain of lush, you could make a whole lot of burgers. But lush can be more than burgers. It can be clothes, and it can even take on the shape and properties of living things like flowers and animals.
The main areas that lush show up in my universes so far are:
Aura: Aura's birth parents are merfolk, but she had a genetic anomaly that affects one in a million merpeople. She was born with legs instead of a tail and she can't breathe underwater. Her birth mother, Darcy, gifted Aura with gold stud earrings before handing her over to her adoptive mother. The earrings are made of lush, and as soon as Aura was old enough to imagine other worlds, she was able to travel to them.
Aura's adoptive mother (Britney) assumed that Aura's ability came from being a mermaid, but merfolk in in Aura's birth universe don't have any more magical powers than two-legged people. They're just evolved from fish instead of monkeys.
Anyway, Aura grew up just assuming that she was magical, when she's thirteen, it occurs to her that there might be other merfolk born with two legs like hers. Lush takes her to meet Coral, a mermaid princess born with two legs who gets by underwater by using a prosthetic tail and a device that allows her to breathe underwater.
Coral takes Aura to a top-secret underwater facility made of lush where Aura gets to meet Lush, an AI avatar who gets to do fun exposition dumps. (This is why lush is called "lush" in Aura's world but someone like Cherie, whose home world invented the supercomputers, just thinks of lush as computers.)
AI Lush lets Aura know that a secret cabal of powerful world leaders have found out about lush and are trying to mine the planet for it. Lush and Aura work together for three years to try to remove stockpiles of lush from four of the evilest billionaires and to discredit the idea of lush as being a hoax. But, after three years, Lush lets Aura know that they have failed. The four billionaires have started fighting amongst themselves and have decided to explode the world into four equal pieces, with the lush they have control over creating an atmosphere for each quarter, ostensibly creating four planetettes that each billionaire can control.
The problem is that the billionaires have miscalculated and are basically just going to end up killing everyone on the planet. The only option that Lush can suggest at this point is to have Aura gather as much lush from all of the universes she can visit and reinforce the atmospheres that the billionaires are intending to create.
The downside to this is that all of the universes, thousands of them, will be stripped of lush and many of them will be detrimentally affected. Lush thinks that she can avoid deaths, but a lot of people will be affected by poverty, hunger, and potentially life-threatening situations. Or, since Aura's home universe is literally the only one in which the billionaires have reached this particular level of evil, maybe this universe gets what it deserves and Earth just isn't in it anymore.
Aura is torn. By this point, she's made enough friends in enough worlds, parallel as well as completely different from ours, that the amount of people (etcetera) who will be affected if she saves her home universe will far outweigh the population of her Earth. And, of course, since Aura can bring people with her when she travels to different worlds, she could save the people that she loves the most, but what about the people she loves less, the people she likes, and even the people she actively dislikes? And what about the people she's never met? Each one of them is just as unique and irreplaceable as the people she knows. Allowing them all to die because of four evil billionaires (and their evil friends and all of their banally evil staff members) doesn't seem right either.
She meets Cherie at the Atelier Cafe where they debate the matter, and in the end, Aura chooses to save her home universe. The way that she personally is affected is that she's no longer able to travel. There isn't a grain of lush that is free for her personal use, every single grain is being used to hold each of the four planetettes together.
So, Aura, who has been able to travel freely to any world she can imagine since before she could speak, is stuck on one part of a broken world. She works with Lush to try to stitch it back together for decades by scraping up as much lush as possible between the worlds so that she can bring the worlds back together. Just as she's dying of old age, she finally succeeds. I'm not sure if lush keeps her alive longer and the Rifted period lasts for hundreds of years, or if the Rift only lasts like eighty years before Aura is able to perform The Mend.
The event of the worlds being blown apart is known as The Rift. The event where the worlds come back together is called The Mend. So, history is divided into Pre-Rift, Rifted, and Mended times. Due to The Rift, humanity in Aura's home universe lost a lot of technology and history, so history in the Rifted time period is mingled and mangled with myth quite a lot. It's amazing how quickly humanity can lose track of itself in just a generation or two. To be fair, there was still a lot of loss of life, and it was a pretty traumatic event. People were more interested in surviving the day and then the year and then the generation for a while. Because all of the lush in the world had been pulled to hold together the atmosphere, many technologies also fell apart.
During the event of The Rift, Aura basically mind-melded with all of the other Auras in alternate universes and for the whole Rifted time, she's basically been living as every potential Aura. So, she gets confused a lot. She always knows her mission, but she'll tell the same story more than once and the events will be different, or the people in her life will have different vocations and stuff.
When The Mend happens, she loses all sense of herself completely. When we meet her again, she is in the shape of a male unicorn who insists he's a bear (he can shape shift into a bear, but he usually switches between his unicorn form and his human form that has a unicorn horn in the middle of his forehead). He knows all of the Aura stories and the stories of The Rift and The Mend, but not as memories. He's also no longer flesh and is entirely made up of lush at this point. Eventually, he remembers who he is but doesn't feel like Aura or Bear, but some combination. He resumes human form, but is kind of androgynous and starts going by Beaura.
The Mended time period has plenty of lush but in a mostly concentrated area in the middle of the planet, integrated into the planet's core. Very little is available for human use, and it's generally thought of as magical, but anyone can learn to manipulate it.
Coral: Coral is a mermaid princess born with two legs who gets by underwater by using a prosthetic tail and a device that allows her to breathe underwater. Because she holds the device in her mouth, she's mute underwater and uses sign language in order to communicate with other merfolk. She's twenty-three when she meets Aura and twenty-six when she ventures out onto land for the first time.
She discovers the Lush facility when she's nineteen. She's far from home when her breathing device fails and the facility sends out a mechanical shark to steer Coral to the facility. Lush saves Coral and helps Coral solve the mystery of who has been sabotaging her breathing devices.
When Coral is twenty-three, she meets Aura and I haven't really worked out why, maybe Aura's ability to travel to whatever world she wants to go to clues her in, but she takes Aura to meet Lush. Aside from a coin-sized bit of lush that Lush gives Coral to use as a breathing device (or whatever), Coral doesn't really have anything to do with lush. I imagine that she might help Aura save the world, but I'm not actually sure. Maybe she just gives Aura a shoulder to cry on or advice or something.
Coral's main story arc is about venturing out on land, becoming a nanny for a deaf six-year-old, and falling in love with the six-year-old's father. She also has an incident with the girl's uncle (Tom), wherein the lush rushes into his face and heals his adult severe acne. It was something he was super self-conscious about and the mind-reading AI picked up on it from a mile away.
Coral will also lose the lush when The Rift happens, so when she visits her family, she'll have to rely on less technologically advanced breathing gear. I'm not sure what The Rift does to ocean life, especially where her parents live, but I imagine everyone will be fine. I'm not the kind of author who likes to kill her characters; even the red shirts get to live.
Tom: Tom is the uncle of Coral's charge whose name I don't remember at the moment. He works as an accountant but he really wants to be a dollmaker. His twin sister died a couple of years prior to him meeting Coral, and he's still grieving. Even though he was super self-conscious about his severe adult acne, he's not really prepared for how differently people treat him once the lush fixes his face.
This is the extent of his interaction with lush, but it means that he knows something about Coral that his niece and brother-in-law don't. He and Coral become pretty good friends, and she becomes kind of an honorary sister. Although she doesn't fill the space that his twin left behind, she does give him a glimpse of magic and it kind of jump starts him into being interested in living again -- or at least to stop resenting each breath that means he's still alive.
Tom's story is also a love story between him and an old college girlfriend who turns out to be his new boss, Sal. I came up with this story in 2009-ish, and now I'm wondering if Sal should be a dude, but I have never written or even come up with a gay relationship to base a story on, so I feel a little insecure about that idea. We'll see.
Jane: Jane is Bear's best friend. Bear is Aura, post-Mend. Jane's story is about being a child who was prophesied to save the world from a great evil.
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