We Don't Have Dragonhide Gloves

I've been wanting to blog about something nerdy for a while now, not because I've had any blogworthy, nerdy thoughts, but because I wanted to take a break from having to come up with blogworthy thoughts. Besides, many of my thoughts end up being blogworthy, or at lest bloggable, if I spend enough time thinking about them, so maybe this blog post will have something spiritual in it after all. In fact, I already think I know what the spiritual thought is going to be: We don't have dragonhide gloves.

I play Magic: the Gathering, a collectible card game with fantasy-based settings and magic. When I first started playing Magic, I read that, supposedly, each player is a "planeswalker," a being with the ability to travel between different worlds, or "planes," learning new spells (represented by new cards), and gradually gaining incredible magical power.

However, I find that many players don't take this "planeswalker" concept very seriously. They just collect the cards and play the game. Not me. Took the idea and ran with it. I created a planeswalker character for myself, using each deck I have to portray a different aspect of my character's personality or a different chapter in my character's life. I gave my character goals and desires, and a little bit of a background.

Lately, I've been focussing a bit more on my character's background, partly because the main story of the game has returned to the plane that I had decided was my character's homeworld. A person becomes a planeswalker when their planeswalker spark ignites. Before then, they're just a normal person, possessing only as much magical power as any other person on their world might have. I thought about what kind of magic I'd want my character to know before and after his spark ignited. Since I mostly use red decks which revolve around fire and dragons and such, I wanted his magic to be somewhat flame-related, but I didn't want to just call him a pyromancer and leave it at that. I wanted his speciality abilities to be more specific than that. That's when I came up with the idea for something I call "solid flame."

Many sci-fi and fantasy worlds accept the notion of solid-light objects. The Green Lantern of the DC universe makes solid-light objects all the time. In Halo, you can make and cross solid-light bridges. There are solid-light bridges in Portal 2 as well. I figured that if people could magically shape light into solid objects, why couldn't another person do the same with a different kind of energy, like flame? I tinkered with the idea and decided that, in addition to knowing basic pyromancy, my planeswalker character specialized in making solid-flame weapons. (I might change that decision later. I retcon my planeswalker all the time.)

Of course, solid-flame is slightly different from solid-light. Specifically, solid-flame is hot, while solid-light usually isn't. You could normally touch solid-light objects without burning yourself, but that isn't true of solid flame. To handle a solid-flame object would require a certain amount of fire-resistance in addition to the ability to create the solid-flame object in the first place. I decided that that was too much to ask of a non-planeswalker magic-user, and I didn't want to make my character immune to fire anyway, so I decided that he could make the fire-weapons, but to wield them, he would need some special gloves, dragonhide gloves.

With his dragonhide gloves, my character could create powerful, solid-flame weapons and wield them without burning himself, so that he could burn others without getting burned as well. We can't do that. Whenever we handle harmful things with the intention of hurting others, we get hurt as well. Angry, piercing words and violent actions are just as harmful to the attacker's soul as they are to the victims' hearts and bodies. We cannot wish harm on others without causing harm to ourselves. We can't wield solid-fire weapons with impunity because we don't have dragonhide gloves. And God will never give us dragonhide gloves.

God doesn't want us to perform hurtful actions. He loves all of His children, and He doesn't want us to get hurt, but He especially doesn't want us to hurt each other. The damaging consequences of hurting others are meant to dissuade us from hurting others. As much as God would like to protect His children from all sources of harm, He knows better than to make us immune to the consequences of trying to harm others. If we purposefully hurt others, we will always get hurt in return.

So maybe solid-fire isn't as cool as I thought it was. Maybe I'll have to think of some other fire-related speciality for my planeswalker character. Or maybe I'll use solid-fire as a starting point and have my character gradually learn magic that's less violent. I am also fond of white magic, which is the color of goodness and protection and healing. Maybe I'll have my character start red and gradually transition to white. I'll keep my options open for now, but I'd like to think that my character will have become a better person as a result of his experiences, just as I hope to become a better person as a result of mine. If nothing else, my character just taught me of how bad of an idea it is to intentionally wish harm on anyone, no matter how I feel about them. My character may be able to wield solid-fire weapons without burning himself, but I know I can't, and even if I could, I know God wouldn't want me to. It's better for us not to use red fire magic, but to use white healing magic instead, which is why God will never give any of us a pair of dragonhide gloves.