Sometimes "cute" and "fun" can be part of a serious magical practice.
I drew a witchy mascot to act as a “public persona” to distract or disrupt any sort of evil eye shit, attention from my ex or whatever. Then I immediately began wondering about other applications... if one could do a “mascot” as a kind of digital poppet spell and if so how I’d taglock it.
Anyway this is Songbird. Everybody say hi to Songbird!
If I'd thought of this a year ago, I'd have made one for my kid when they were dealing with bullies...
I also experimented with a worksona mascot as a focus for building and booting up a more solid set of shields specifically for work, where I was Caring Too Much and burning me out.
This is the point where a relatively new practice overlaps with something we've done most of our life, though there was a gap of, oh, fifteen years in there. You may or may not know that we’re a plural system. When I was younger we had a whole bunch of AIs or bots or thoughtforms or whatever you’d call it who were programmed to handle different parts of our life, because we didn’t have enough people who wanted to front and could handle, like, public high school.
(Can you blame them?)
The whole system got kind of janked up over the years and in the late oughts we ended up taking it all apart, removing the code for most of them and designing a working to ensoul the ones who were sentient and wanted to. (long story)
But I’m thinking instead of either full on bots or the kind of basic masks that we use for singlet passing at work, this would be something in the middle, more like an Eva unit or any other semi-sentient giant mecha. Whoever is fronting can drive the Loyal Employee Mecha and the suit takes most of the damage in real time.
I’m sure there are less dramatic ways of dealing with burnout at work than building a giant robot that does customer service, but you have to admit, it sounds hilarious when I put it like that.