When we first arrived in Wyatt, we sat down and checked out our journals. In Eorzea they would dynamically update as we gained knowledge and experience, with maps of areas and lists of locations for gathering plant and mineral materials. Here, all that was blank. The crafting recipes were still there, as well as information about ourselves, but all the maps and the botany and mining info were gone.

At first I was afraid it meant Eorzean resource gathering wouldn't be possible here, which would make crafting and repairs difficult. But while I was typing yesterday, Tsu'na went out to explore. I thought at the time she meant she'd explore the town, but it seems she went out into the woods near where we arrived and tried her botany skills. She came back and showed me her journal, and now there's an entry for maple logs with a GPS location, and a partial map of Wyatt and the surrounding area.

This is good for lots of reasons. Eorzean harvesting is noninvasive: get logs from a tree without cutting down the tree; get minerals from the ground without making a hole. As long as that's true here, we've got a source of income. We can sell materials and make things to sell. If we find gold somewhere we'll be totally set.

And it's good that I didn't tell Tsu'na that that sort of harvesting wasn't possible on Earth. My doubts made me hesitant to try; her certainty meant she simply walked out and harvested as she'd always done.

This gets back to the gestalt reality in Mage. Magic in Mage works based on the belief of the practitioner: however the practitioner believes things should work, that's how they work for him. The collection of beliefs and ideas that make magic work for a person is called the "paradigm". An effective mage doesn't think in terms of what his paradigm is, though...he simply knows it's true and operates accordingly.

Yes, Mage is a tabletop roleplaying game. But it's also a convenient set of terms and ideas I can use to frame things. So in that sense, Tsu'na's paradigm is that Eorzean skills work the same way here as they did back home, and my paradigm is that this is unusual but I can work with it.

But if what we do with our Eorzean skills is paradigm-based magic, it may be that we're not "harvesting" things as much as creating them. It would actually explain how things in Eorzea worked. The belief in Eorzea is that everything is made of aether, that this is the stuff of creation or existence. When we harvested, say, maple logs at a particular place, we also had the chance to instead harvest crystallized aether, which we use to fuel our crafting. But what if all harvesting was in fact gathering aether, just manifested in different forms? Yes, we used an axe on a tree, but the tree remained undamaged. It makes sense if we were actually getting aether at the tree in wood form, rather than taking from the tree itself.

This is exciting because it busts through what I think of as possible. We've got two paradigms here...three if you count the mundane human paradigm that magic isn't possible at all. So other things might be possible that we haven't even thought of yet.

But I don't know how much of this I can tell Tsu'na. I need her belief system free and uninhibited by my doubts, at least until we've affirmed that all our Eorzean abilities work here. And I think she already suspects there's stuff I haven't told her.

In the meantime, I've got wood to gather.