So, I was rereading the rules for preternatural tathers in RoP:M after a discussion in one forum and noted the following.
The rules say that some kinds of magical beings form tethers, noting that any place that they currently inhabit, and which they have inhabited for at least a year, has a tether score equal to (being’s Might / 10), rounded down. So far, so good. As I understand, a 40 Might dragon would have a preternatural tether of 4, which (all other things being equal) would generate a level 4 Aura. So that means that the dragon would have a floating Aura of 4 around it all the time, right? It would also have an Aura of 4 in its lair, assuming it has lived in its lair for at least a year, regardless of whether it was in the lair at the time.
I guess I never thought about this before. But does this mean that whenever you run into a powerful dragon, there's always an aura around it?
Granted, the rules say "some kind of magical beings" form tethers and that "other kinds of magical beings" do not generate an aura. I guess that's up to the SG or the troupe to decide. So a 10 Might Raven of Virtue may not generate its own aura, but a 40 Might dragon may. I'd assume that, in general, the more powerful the creature, the more likely it is to generate an aura.
Things get a little more complicated when Daimons enter the picture. They only have Aspects in the world and never actually leave the Magic Realm. Does an Aspect of a Daimon generate an Aura even though it's just an Aspect? I have to admit that I like the idea of an Aspect of Odin, say, generating a small aura around him all the time.
What about the destruction of an Aspect? Is that considered 'death' under the tether rules? Because the site of the death of a magical being has a permanent tether of Might/20. I tend to think not, since it was just an Aspect, and the Daimon lives on - though I thought I'd check with the gestalt to see what it thought on the matter.
Here's a few situations that I'm considering. Assume for ,the sake of argument, that Daimonic Aspects do generate tethers, and that we're talking about a 40 Might Daimon. What about the following situations.
A maga summons the Daimonic Aspect
This seems the easy answer, There's an Aura 4 surrounding the Aspect for as long as it remains.
A maga summons the Daimonic Aspect and convinces it to stay for a year
As I see it, An Aura 4 should remain as long as the Daimon is there. Then, since it lived there for a year, the Aura 4 would remain, even when it left. However, since the Daimonic Aspect is no longer living there, the Aura would fade over the next few years by one point per year until the aura was eventually gone.
A maga summons the Daimonic Aspect and convinces it to stay for a year, but halfway through the year it's destroyed
Here's where it gets tricky. You clearly don't get the 4 Aura for the Aspect being there. You also don't get the 4 Aura for the Aspect having been there for the full year. But do you get anything for the destruction of the Aspect? I'm leaning toward no, since it was just an aspect and wasn't really 'killed' (more like a soap bubble being popped). It certainly doesn't seem momentous enough to warrant a permanent Aura 2. What are other people's thoughts on that?
I think it is absolutely reasonable for a dragon's lair to have an aura due to the dragon's long presence there.
I don't think it is reasonable for a dragon to drag its Aura around, unless it has a special ability that lets it.
Some of the powers listed in the spirit chapter seem reasonable for certain beings that are not spirits. For example, any dragon I design has Presence for its lair.
In general, the question I would ask regarding whether a magic being ought to count as a tether is, "Is this place thematically connected to the being or does it just happen to be there?"
So a dragon is a fine tether to its lair. The daimonic aspect of the deep forest also influences the forest, and vice versa. The daimonic familiar.... maybe.
(As for daimons versus their aspects... The rules for this need work. Essentially, you should never encounter the true daimon, no matter how hard you look, only aspects of that daimon, with aspects not necessarily being identical. Any writeup of a daimon, or power ascribed to a daimon, is about an aspect.)
As you roughly paraphrased it above, RoP:M p.10 Magical Beings talks about some beings forming tethers to places by inhabiting them for significant time.
A dragon just walking through or even having a nap would not affect or create an Aura - unless your SG posits a very weird and story-specific effect.
I interpreted the OP to mean that : Given one normally encounters dragons in their Lairs: whenever you run into a powerful dragon, there's always an aura around it?
Last few dragon's I've met have been in my lair - entering our covenant like the Aegis wasn't there and making demands.
Sure, there was an aura, but not because of the dragon...
I don't think magical creatures have portable auras. The creature creating an aura after a year is optional, but certainly makes sense as a preternatural tether. Likelihood probably has more to do with the creatures intent and story than another set of mechanics being needed (as Ken said, +1).
In its chosen lair after a year? yes. Where it has been trapped/imprisoned ? Maybe.
The creature shouldn't have an aura when initially summoned/arrives.
If the creature (daimon, dragon, whatever) leaves or dies then the tether should go as well, unless some other powerful related event has replaced the tether.
Having a creature/daemon have powers which establish auras is odd. Why does it have that power? What part of its essential nature supports the power; what rationale makes sense?
I"ll add a little more detail to help explain where I'm coming from.
A player wants his maga to create a magical forest where there wasn't one before. Let me start by saying that this is a high-powered saga whose central theme is transforming Mythic Europe, so I'm okay with his general plan. The maga has jumped through a number of hoops to be able to make a pact with an appropriate daimon to make the attempt. The plan is to summon the Aspect, have it take the form of a tree, and thereby establish a tether and a magical aura of in the area. The player reasons that once the tree has remained for a year the maga could withdraw it or leave it as an effective Genius Loci. The player further reasons that if it is withdrawn or cut down after one year the aura will drop by half in the affected area.
Over the course of some discussion, a few issues have been raised:
Would an Aspect of a (sufficiently powerful) daimon be enough to create a thether?
How difficult would it be to convince the daimon to leave the Aspect in place for a full year?
Does destroying an Aspect really count as the 'death' of a powerful creature (leaving a Might/20 Aura in the area)?
Can you really create a Genius Loci in that manner?
Assuming, for the moment, that an Aspect could have a tether, and assuming that the daimon could be convinced to have one of its Aspect inhabit an area for a full year, my thought is that an Aura would arise, but that as soon as the Aspect left, it would begin to decline by one point per year. But, All is not lost. It seems to me that an effort to draw in mythical creatures to live in this fading magical forest might serve to save it's aura. It would be sort of like jump starting a car. A wyvern won't move to the forest unless it has an aura. But once it moves there, it helps bolster the aura. The plan could easily be to make sure that by the time the Aspect's aura has faded, there would be enough other sources of aura in the forest to keep it magical. That also serves as a nice source of story.
To clarify- the statement was that the Daimon could decide to withdraw the aspect or sever their connection to it, and mechanically the daimon has the power of presence, which does establish an aura and without a 1 year requirement as written...
These issues appear to depend on the specific daimon, hence on the specific story and SG. Don't dither too much here: be bold, take your responsibilities and create the personalities of daimon and aspect to fit your story.
I think it's a great plan, and I'd personally say to work with the player to make it happen. I think it's a reasonable interpretation of the rules, and I'd suggest that some spirits would be able to extend their Presence power over the nearby region, subtly transforming it into a greater likeness to their "True Form" and thereby granting it the magical aura it gains after a year. This can be a per-spirit thing, no need to make a general ruling on this.
So let's talk about Auras, something I've done every now and then over the past few editions, canonically and kenonically. By necessity, we'll talk about daimons and supernatural beings.
Canonically, the supernatural is divided into four realms. But also canonically, there are other perspectives. The Hermetic perspective of 4 realms is strongly supported by the game rules, to the point where those other perspectives simply seem incorrect. In the same way, we have four different rulesets for creating beings of those 4 realms.
I prefer a perspective where it is all just one thing, with the realms as magi perceive them being an emergent property of their incomplete theory, with the realms as various religious or folk traditions perceive them similarly resulting from imperfect understanding..... which I, of course, have.
A common way of viewing the world, even across apparently disparate traditions:
There are beings which we can call angels, spirits or whatever a tradition prefers. A modern day Platonist Physicist might consider them particles that are carriers of ideals, meaning and identity. Everything in the real world is associated with at least one, though most are associated with many. These beings cannot normally be perceived directly. But various supernatural abilities (note the lower case) allow people to perceive or interact with some of these beings, at least some of the time. Sometimes a being makes itself perceptible to anyone.
Not all beings with Might are entities of this kind. Generally speaking, if you can think of an entity as representing something or as having the power over something, rather than just being what it is, it is an entity of this kind. The world is filled with things that are wondrous yet of this world.
Wherever something exists in ordinary reality, to borrow a phrase, a corresponding spirit is also present. Is there a tree? There too are many, many entities: Green, leaf, wood, brown, shade, tall, strong, oak, this oak, this leaf, that leaf, that vein, insect, bee, that bee, sound, buzzing, rustling, leaf rustling, the possibility of a boat... And all the spirits of this place. Sometimes an entity of the trees origin lingers, the spirit of "someone planted a tree" and that of "Bob planted this tree for a bow for his son when he comes of age," and the spirit of the potential of that bow is still waiting by that tree even though Bob and his son died of disease 100 years ago, which might make its wood particularly eager to serve as a bow, or maybe that spirit is now gone from here...
A person can see all of this reality through its manifestation in the world, but to see the myriads of beings that form even the simplest thing, or the myriads upon myriads of things that compose an ordinary purview, is to court madness. Various traditions warn about the dangers. Just about any ability that allows access to this mechanism in a controlled way allows only small glimpses. It is possible to get a better view, say, by entering Twilight, or meditating on the names of God, or traveling to places in the world where the essence of things is laid bare.
Broadly speaking, human supernatural activity falls into three categories.
The most common supernatural activity by far is rarely considered supernatural at all. People interact with ordinary reality all the time, never appreciating that reality isn't ordinary at all. Every situation is a confluence of countless forces of cosmic significance, and every action results in a realignment of those forces, creating new forces and destroying others.
Next involves dealing directly with the entities. This kind of magic usually starts small and stays there, often involving a small exchange of gifts, but is overall the most powerful in the short term, since it involves direct interaction with the forces that represent and mediate between everything that can exist and everything that does exist. It is also the most perilous, because these beings have intent, possibly even fragments of God's intent that taken together represents the creation and continual sustainance of the world. To interfere with these beings is to interfere directly with the fabric of existence, and to focus unnatural attention on you. Most societies fear magic, and rightly so. What man understands the consequences?
The last kind of magic deals with these entities indirectly, ostensibly affecting the ordinary world. This kind of magic is harder to learn but is also much safer and can still be very powerful. Side effects can still be catastrophic, but the scope tends to be limited to ordinary reality.
Few supernatural traditions are purely of this last kind, and these few tend to be called natural magic. Many kinds of Hedge Magic blur the lines; it can be difficult to determine when a folk magic involves propitiating or influencing a spirit versus leveraging an occult but natural property of the world. Hermetic Magic is mostly natural, but can also influence spirits.
You cannot really destroy a spirit directly, for all that sometimes it seems you can. As long as the idea of say, green or evil or death exists, there will be spirits of these things and a Spirit of each of these things. Destroying the spirit of the Rhine might harm the Rhine itself, but if the Rhine still exists then the spirit must exist too. This is the sense in which a spirit has what the rules call "Aspects." It is far easier to destroy the Rhine by physically destroying the Rhine, which will cause the spirit to be destroyed or to exist only as possibility. In a similar way, you are not going to kill the spirit of a story (a faerie in AM5) for real without removing the story from the world. For a while, though, it might look like you did. In the same way, a magus who destroys a ghost with PeVi will probably need to find the mundane cause of that ghost, and a musician who destroys Satan by winning a contest has not really destroyed Satan at all; doing that requires eliminating sin. Nonetheless, "destroying" a spirit can have value: Destroying a spirit of disease can provide a respite which allows time to heal the patient so it cannot come back. Destroying a vengeful ghost that has persisted past its time, simply because the offense against it was so great that its haunt has become "the place this ghost haunts" might also really destroy the ghost. (Or not.)
A noticeable Aura occurs when one or more spirits are strongly present. Since every act and every thing in the world involves a confluence of unseen spirits, especially intense acts and things involve especially powerful spirits. An angry person is surrounded by anger spirits, and acts committed in anger also have anger spirits that linger where the act occurred. These are few, weak and short-lived most of the time. Of what realm? We normally associate wrath the the Infernal, yet wrath can be Divine or neutral or part of story. Or all of the above. A person filled with anger can shift the cosmic balance through the actions he takes in anger, through what he does with it.
How big should Auras be? I hesitate to fix mechanics to any of this, since Might is broken. If we keep the "Aura up to 10" scale, then I recommend Auras of 1-3 being extremely common, and an Aura of 0 non-existent, since everything is something. I also recommend differentiating between the long-term Aura and short-term fluctuations. A churchyard might have Aura 3, but if that doesn't calm a crazed mob bent on rapine, the effective Aura right now might be Infernal 2. I also recommend that Auras correspond not only to the "sponsoring power," but to particular activities. The canonical division of Auras represents a conflict of power sources, and that has unhappy results around the edges, which matters in some games.
Tethers? Sure, but maybe not these rules. A single feature, say, a sheer cliff of purest diamond might all on its own be the source of Aura 8. It alone is responsible for all sorts of secondary features: The refracted rainbows that fill the sky, the sweet grass in the glade below on which unicorns feed, the pure water that overflows its lip, the dragon that carved a lair into its side, and the utterly cold winter that makes living there a challenge. Or maybe that diamond cliff is so perfect that nothing else can bear to be there. (The last covenant that tried killed themselves in despair, and even that mortal sin was insignificant compared to that perfect diamond.) By and large do what you like.
The Presence spirit power? I like this, but the GM needs to step up and decide every case. If an entity has this power, we are saying that it corresponds to a particular place, similar to the way a spirit of anger corresponds to anger, to the way the spirit of the Rhine corresponds to the Rhine. And if it has this power, we are saying that this usually immaterial entity is actually here, and this might affect the Aura. How much? Well, how much has it made the place its own?
Can you create Genius Loci? No. But you can cause one to come into being. You don't even need magic to do this.
Does destroying an Aspect destroy the spirit? Virtually never. You cannot kill the sunrise, even if its name is Bob. You can kill a party, but the party spirit is everlasting, until partying is no more. You can take their lives, you can take their freedom (aspects of freedom, each an angel or spirit or faerie or daimon or demon), but you can never take Freedom.
I find that the problem with spirits is the, well, Physico-Spiritual Correspondence. You need to somehow reflect the fact that the spirits of things are connected to physical things in the world, yet keep things sensible game-wise. If you kill the spirit of the mountain and render it for raw vis - what happens to the mountain? If you destroy the mountain - what happens to the spirit?
So I suggest that affecting the spirit of a place or thing should be mystically connected to its physical condition. For mundane things, the connection is that wounding either will be reflected in the other. Thus, wounding a mountain (say, by carving a quarry into it) will result in wounding its spirit, and vice versa wounding its spirit will be reflected in corresponding mountain slides and collapses in the mountain. This may take time (a Season?), but the two levels will come to fit one another. For this to work well, the spirit should be at least as difficult to affect as the object - so affecting the spirit of the mountain, for example, will require the Te Form and some magnitudes to affect a being of that Size.
For objects of Might, the spirit world should be the primary level. So if you wound a Magical mountain, it will in time (a Season?) revert back to its true, unwounded, shape, corresponding to its spirit. Conversely, if you lower the Might Score of the spirit, the physical mountain will be correspondingly depleted in time. Note that creatures of Might generally fall into this category - but vanquishing the dragon physically is usually equivalent to vanquishing it spiritually as well, as the raw vis in it is "rendered" and condensed into the corresponding body part.
Persons are not objects. The spirit of a person is its ghost; it can be affected only by Mentem, not Corpus, and the spirit and body do not mystically reflect each other. Similarly the spirit of an angel or demon, which can be affected by Mentem, is not its body, which can be affected by Vim. These spirits are eternal - they cannot be killed or depleted (lowering their Might Score or rendering them for raw vis; although magically-created bodies such as angelic, demonic, or ghostly bodies tend to leave raw vis behind if "killed"). This is why the demon is bound below the castle, rather than offed with a Demon's Eternal Oblivion, and why ghosts are sent to their afterlife rather than laid to rest with a spell. Such canon spells can "wound" a spirit or temporarily push it to its corresponding Realm, but cannot truly kill it.
The truly powerful spirits, including the spirits of abstractions (A Mountain, rather than This Mountain), reside in the Realms, and one only interacts with their Aspects. It may be possible to interact with them directly by traveling to their Realm of Power, and if so they should also be considered eternal.
Canonically, rendering a supernatural entity for vis means that it is utterly and totally destroyed. This is not explicitly stated as a Law, but is strongly implied (or at least I found it too easy to so infer). In Faeries, this rule is explicitly stated, at least for Faeries. I feel comfortable seeing this as canon, and it seems you see it that way too.
But (kenonically) the thing that has been destroyed is only an aspect.
Destroying the aspect destroys an important connection between ordinary reality and whatever lies on the other side, which might be God all the way on the other side of Ein Sof, the light of Plato's cave, the essential essence of the thing that was created during the Dreamtime and is hidden within Uluru with all the essences of everything that ever was and ever will be, awaiting its time.
Until that connection is reformed, renewed, regenerated, re-established, or perhaps created anew, the mountain is vulnerable. The aspect is not there to act in its interest. Yet the mountain itself is not destroyed. All of the other connections remain, more than can be easily counted even for a single pebble of that mountain, each connection an aspect of reality.
What happens to the mountain now? It depends what people do in ordinary reality. With the aspect defining this mountain out of the way, there is an opportunity to make of the mountain what you will. If you do nothing? Maybe the mountain will erode, as all those other aspects disconnect. Maybe in a few years everything returns to exactly how things were, and for all that anyone can tell, the exact same aspect has returned. Maybe the mountain remains, but has a different personality: Perhaps more dangerous with an aspect seeking vengeance on mankind, perhaps brooding, perhaps desolate, perhaps gentler.
There should be no particular rule for how a situation like this resolves. Deciding the consequences reaches the heart of how a GM or troupe creates scenarios and stories. The right answer will not be consistent across sagas, or even across incidents in a particular saga.
An example might be helpful.
A group of magi decide to set up their spring covenant on the slopes of a majestic mountain deep within the Alps. Or the Carpathians or wherever. Oddly enough, though one side of the mountain is perfect for a pass for which lucrative tolls could be charged yet still create prosperity for all who used it, the entire region is considered impassable due to unpredictable snowstorms, even during the summer. It has been centuries since anyone has dared the place. The mountain is alone and likes it that way. I suppose the mountain ought to have a name, though no living mortal knows it, so lets just call it Caradhras.
In blissful ignorance, our intrepid magi set themselves up. Near the peak where the Aura is highest, they use magics to carve for themselves a covenant of living stone. They use more magics to clear the pass of snow. They throw up towers to guard the pass and offer a place for loyal warrior and their families to hold the towers. It should be easy, yet simple die rolls are inexplicably stressed, and a friendly magic Aura sometimes adds to botches. Storms arise and the land slides unpredictably. There are deaths among the grogs, and morale is low, the way it gets when winter is the enemy and is winning: Caradhras is fighting back.
Magi being magi, they do not give up. They do what magi do. They seek ancient texts about the area. They journey to Arcadia in search of stories and insight. They research new spells and forge dire weapons. They exchange favors. They gather vis. They defeat Caradhras and its allies on midwinter's day, and cement their victory by using their vis in their Aegis ritual.
What now?
As I was saying, there should be no rule for this. Maybe Caradhras comes back in a few years, mad as Hell and (of course) Infernal. Maybe the Aura goes down a point. Maybe the moutain becomes tranquil as a new aspect emerges, reflecting what the magi make of the place. Maybe an old aspect that has been kept in check by Caradhras emerges, an aspect far more powerful and terrible. Or maybe the mountain melts away to nothing come the spring rain. I think that last is neither likely nor apt... but whose saga is it, anyway?
Destroying the mountain can destroy or banish the aspect. If the aspect is the connection between realities, with the mountain gone the connection is also gone. If the aspect is gone,I do not know what has happened to the aspect. I don't see how magi can know either. But sometimes the aspect remains, if it is powerful enough, if it is determined enough, if the circumstances of the mountain's destruction are significant enough. Exactly the way killing someone sometimes leaves a ghost behind; it is all the same. This kind of spirit will always react according to its nature. It might seek vengeance, it might seek to recreate the thing it is, it might do something else. Again, I don't think there should be a rule for this.
I see the attractions of this approach, yet recommend a bit of separation. What I described above is subtly different, but I think the difference is important.
Let's get medieval and start with God. Ultimately, everything that exists connects back up to God. Delving a quarry in a mountain does not affect God. It does not injure the Angel of Mountains (Sar Heharim? Hariel? ) or the Angel of That Mountain.
I use Angel instead of Spirit merely as a shift of tradition, to better illustrate what I mean. The principles and mechanics are exactly the same, whether we call the spirit of Caradhras an angel (no man shall pass through this gate to paradise) or a demon (I'm gonna kill anyone I can reach) or a faerie (every time people are afraid to travel here, I gather vitality) or a daimon (I just want to be alone).
So delving a quarry does not injure the spirit. It might not even anger the spirit. Maybe the spirit of some particular mountain likes the new quarry, and will use its powers to encourage it. (Divine: The people gathered here will become a God-fearing community and the stone from the quarry will crown this mountain with church. Infernal: Oh, goody. Quarries mean drunken miners and corrupt landowners and mining accidents! Faerie: I feel a change coming on. I don't know what it is, but it sure feels good. Ooh, people! Magic: I am a bountiful mountain, a place where animals have grown strong and now people too.)
The mountain and the spirit correspond to each other, but are not the same thing.
I prefer not to differentiate between objects or anything else. Everything has attendant spirits. An "object of Might" is simply an object with a particularly powerful spirit.
From one perspective, spiritual reality is always the primary level, and objects in ordinary reality mere shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. From another perspective, ordinary reality is always the primary level, since this is where real choices are made and where real things happen. It may be that good and evil cannot contend with or defeat the other in spiritual reality, since the two are so far apart they cannot even meet; in ordinary reality they can and do meet.
I am again sympathetic to this perspective. As you see, I have a slightly different take. I think rules simplify and story opportunities multiply without such strong linkages.
Let's talk about dragons. Not every wondrous creature is a spirit. I believe that most dragons are creatures, like dogs and like people, for all that they have Might.
The AM5 rules conflate all of this, in an admirable attempt to create a unified idea of Might and its implications, and I think this is not beneficial. Consider a sparrow. A magic sparrow. In a sane world, that magnificent sparrow hatched from a magnificent egg. It started off not knowing much, but being a magnificent sparrow it had absolutely the best abilities one could expect from a perfect sparrow chick. It quickly learned all the things sparrows should learn. Even though the rules make this pretty much impossible, because things with Might are unchanging and have a hard time learning, etc and yuck.
Better to step away from the categories of RoP:M. They do not serve the sparrow, the dragon or the magic boat.
I see two categories, of entities in the ordinary world and of the spirits that comprise underlying reality.
Like me, like you, like the blade of grass, the dragon is an (extraordinary) entity in ordinary reality with a guardian angel and other spirits.
I say it differently, but pretty much yes. The angel I perceive, even if it is immaterial, is not necessarily all that there is. The faerie that I 'kill' is quite happy to exchange my vitality for a mere few pawns of vis. Did I kill the faerie? Not really a relevant question: Either it or something indistinguishable from it will be back for another showing if the story is good enough.
And yes, same with the ghost. Real change happens in the real world, so killing a demon is ultimately less effective than changing the circumstances that make the demon possible, at least here. If the circumstances are not changed, then the associated spirits (or their connection to ordinary reality) cannot possibly have been truly destroyed.
I prefer to treat objects just like cats and people. This is a useful perspective for a game with magic (and a pseudo-medieval feel). The rules also simplify. I think a lot is gained and nothing is lost.
Some say they exist in the Realms, but the Realms might not exist. The Realms are simply an abstraction created by Hermetic Magic. I would not say that only the most powerful spirits reside there. Not only Vengeance, but My Petty Vengeance for Roberto's Cutting in front of Me Yesterday in Line may have existed from the beginning of time and continue to exist there forever. These possibilities might never occur, but if they do, there's an Aspect for that. And if that is destroyed, the thwarted daimon or whatever might never manifest in our world.
Interacting with these things, even becoming aware of these things, is difficult and perhaps mind-shattering. And even once you've found the Spirit of Mountain-ness, how can you be sure that you aren't dealing with something else?
It looks like I have been sucked into one of my favorite AM subtopics, to the point that I'm doing one post per day in November. Go figure. So, a bit of a repeat, but reformulated with an old question made new:
How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?
No kidding, this question is key to understanding how the world works.
The answer is way more than you can easily count, possibly infinite: As many as necessary. There is an angel for every property of the head of a pin, and an angel for every property of the head of that pin, and an angel for every atom (medieval style) in that pin that make it an atom and another for being in that pin and still more for the shine of the head of the pin, and for shine, and for the degree of shine, and for its substance, and for the idea of being at the opposite end of the pin both physically and thematically (sharp vs smooth), and for the smoothness, and for every single other category, property or ideal you can think of that is associated with that pin, even if you have not thought of them.
Each of these provably exists, using the same reasoning that Anselm used to prove that God exists. If you can think of it, it must exist, at least in the spiritual world.
One might think that the spirits or angels associated with fundamental properties are larger, more important or more powerful than those associated with a single property of a single item. This is not necessary so. It may be that the possibility of "pin" exists primarily to allow one special pin to exist at the right time and place for a grand purpose, with the existence of other pins a mere byproduct, and should that pin exist or come to exist in ordinary reality, its Guardian Angel might possess vast powers and intent (and a host of attendant angels for all those implications and properties.) No grand divine plan is needed for this to be true: Back in the Ideal Realm, Magic Realm or whatever we choose to call it, there are many spirits of unfathomable power that have absolutely no manifestation in ordinary reality.
) or the Angel of That Mountain.