If only they could just afford a horse, the math would be so much easier...

I don't even think that's SPEC. A character asking "I wonder who that mystery person was?", followed by a flashback to that person's origin story, is a very common trope.

I'm a little surprised that a connection can be made to the sword via what appears to be the fate web, given that Chaz operates "outside the hands of fate".

https://archives.sluggy.com/book.php?ch ... 2014-05-05

Well, technically "the hand that wields [Chaz]," is outside the hands of fate, but granted, Chaz has to be there to be wielded...

So Krohnus seemed to say that Chaz isn't bound by the fate-web. On the other hand the magic that powers Chaz is dependent on the fate-web, and now Yffi sees Chaz linked to Scribe by the fate-web. How can this apparent contradiction be resolved?

Soco and Schlock both said that magic alters the fate-web. Maybe that's what Krohnus meant: A magic object like Chaz can be used to do things that the fate-web wouldn't normally allow. But Chaz's magic is rule-bound. It's not wild magic that can just do whatever. It can only do a few specific things. It glows, talks, kills and enhances its user's fencing skill. This may mean that Chaz is at least partially bound by the fate-web. Scribe's fate may then be a thing that Chaz can't change.

There's another possible interpretation: Krohnus said "This sword came from the Never! The hand wielding it operates outside the hands of fate!" He may have meant that those two statements were connected. If the fate-web doesn't cover the Never, then it may be that Chaz arrived fully charged with magic from the Never and independent of the fate-web, but over the millennia since then it has subsisted on fate-magic and become bound by the web. In that case Krohnus' statement was true when he said it, but is no longer true in Yffi's time. One thing that speaks against this hypothesis is that Kozoaku was supposedly bound by the fate-web and imprisoned in the Never. That seems to suggest that the fate-web covers the Never.

But how do you compensate for being laden?



That's just a fancy way of saying when Chaz kills it's outside of the control of fate. But just like Oasis, fate can control events around them to guide things in a certain way. The fate spiders killed people with Oasis without directly influencing Oasis. Perhaps he can similarly see that she will meet her end with Chaz even if the actual act lies outside the web. The web can show her actions, which would be to suicide herself on Chaz. The result of that is predictable even without Chaz being controlled by the web, just as the result of Monica wearing an hC hat in front of Oasis is predictable.

Beats me. I haven't got laden in years...