Rambling about Lore: Mana, Part 1 (Patreon)

I've had this Ramble in the chamber for a while, and the urge to talk about it at least a little has kind of boiled over. So here I go.This isn’t the full picture (not even close). Call it… maybe a third of the picture. The rest is spoiler territory, which I won't be talking about here.As usual, this isn’t a big reveal—just the baseline stuff everyone in-universe takes for granted. Emilia (or someone else) will bring it up naturally in conversation later, most likely in her Academy classes when she finally gets there.So...First and foremost: most people don’t actually understand mana. Where it comes from, how it works, why it breaks the rules it does... none of that’s clear. Especially in the Tunnels, where things get really strange.The only thing people do know is that mana seems infinite. There’s always more. Theoretically, you could strip an area bare with enough enchantments running at once, but in practice?Mana just keeps flowing back in from somewhere, somehow.That said, almost all living things have mana within them, as well, and things gets a bit weirder from there. Mana cores—or mana pools depending on who you ask—are where mana is stored in a living being, right?Well, its capacity is also hypothetically infinite. The “space” mana seems to inhabit within a living thing never actually grows, the mana within it just becomes more and more dense.At least, so far as anyone with mana sense or sight can tell.So that begs the question: Why do people have limits at all?Enter the System.It bitch-slaps everyone with a balance-hammer. Expeditiously.It enforces caps based on level, stats, race, Skills... and probably a few other things I'm forgetting right now, but you get the idea. That’s why you get those neat little ‘maximum mana’ numbers the System Status spits out. Without those caps, everyone would just hoard mana forever until… well, until something.As far as anyone can tell, there’s no such thing as ‘too much mana’… but try telling that to an overfed enchantment before it decides to explode in your face. Nobody knows for sure if the same would happen to a living being.Of course, there are exceptions. Arabella’s race, the Arcanthir, for example—they don’t have a maximum at all.But before you start thinking that’s broken beyond belief, they’ve got other restrictions baked in. For Arabella (or any other Arcanthir), a big one is that taking in too much mana at once can, well… disable her, to put it delicately.That’s not the only drawback either, and the drawbacks vary depending on why that beings mana is uncapped, but that’s a story for later. Point is, even the no-limit folks still get reigned in by the almighty System balance-hammer.