u/derpderp3200

I finally got around to working on one of my last year's staves and started whittling my first test bow from it.

I have reached a point where it's starting to bend the way a bow should, though not quite there yet, and it has gotten me wondering, is there a point where the thickness is a liability rather than a way to increase the strength?

I'd assume yes, considering the difference in stretching/compression the cellulose on one end has to undergo vs the other, but where is it, and how to tell it?

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BTW: Not really asking for advice, but if you're curious or have any, the stave is from a young-ish(not quite a sapling) black locust tree, ~130cm long, ~3.5-4cm wide, with sapwood on one side and heartwood the another, it's slightly twisted(a few degrees) and curved(inner curve on sapwood side), so that the bowstring will be slightly to the side of the bow when strung. Any specific advice on this would also be welcome but is besides the point for the topic.

Specifically, this passage:

> She was asleep when the voice called into her head, just like it did to so many who levelled. A voice in her mind. Only—a different one. > > Distant, yes. Very distant. But far stronger. > > Far louder. > > “Ryoka Griffin.” > > Her eyes opened in the middle of the night. Blearily, the Wind Runner looked around. But no one was in her room. Her eyes fluttered back closed, and she assumed it was like when you heard someone ring the doorbell but no one had. Phantom noise. It wasn’t a level up, anyways. She’d never hear that again. She began to drift off—

...doesn't this basically imply that the gods made the leveling system out of the dead Faerie Queen, if Oberon's voice is recognisably similar to the level up notifications in nature?

It would make a horrifying amount of sense - why the Fae despise Innworld, why they despise the system, why they fear bringing anything of theirs into the world out of fear the gods "make it theirs", what happened to the countless fae who died in Innworld.

...And if you think about it, the system, levels, Skills are not made out of just magic, they're made out of STORIES, stories and tropes, which is exactly what the fae embody.

And to add insult to injury, it doesn't even lend itself to the creation of stories, but rather like the dead thing made from corpses that it is, it merely pattern-matches people's actions to pre-existing stories and tropes, warping and overwriting both their capabilities and personality(and thus their potential to create truly new stories) just to rehash the same stories and characters Innworld has been cyclically repeating for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, with even new ideas brought by the Earthers introducing barely a few new classes and skills....

...no wonder the fae are full of such deep, extreme hatred and contempt for the world and the people within it when everything about it is perverted and diminished by a system literally made from the corpses of their beloved queen and kin, turned by their eternal enemies they sacrificed everything to fight into a pale parody of what true, living stories are.

P.S.: I've only read up to 8.54, so please mark spoilers past that with spoiler tags(>!spoiler here!<), and remark how far into the story they are from. I'll read them when/if I reach that point.