…[T]his spell, like many grassroots arcana, was widespread, poorly standardised, and known by many names. Common variants included One-Time Immoral Wife and Illustrious Courtesan Technique; Omeniski et al. collected one version in their Compendium, under the functional but bowdlerised title Temporary Companion. A technically standard small-scale conjuration, it fills the same functional niche as succubus summonings, with the difference that the only debt accrued is payment to the spell provider, and that the conjuration has no independent agentic purpose; it flourished in social environments where mundane sex work was scarce or harshly punished, and arcane work was neither.
The usual limitations of conjuration apply to the spell’s construction and operation. The conjured companionship is temporarily caused to exist by artificial stimulation of reality’s deep structures, the spell’s specific construction serving to target within the akashic matrices; natural variations in timing and energy flow vary this targeting slightly, cause each casting to produce a plausible, unique conjured person. (Deliberately skilled variation can also purposely produce consistent bias within the results — e.g. redheads — if desired.) Each of these conjured persons is one who could exist within the world, a specific point within the multidimensional possibility space of person, whom outside of the spell’s duration nonetheless has not been produced by the universe’s actual processes of cause and effect. Because they are, nonetheless, possible, they philosophically imply the sum total of the vast interweave of historical processes that produce each actual person — by existing temporarily, they introduce discontinuities within reality where they nonetheless imply parents, a childhood, incidental and meaningful interaction with every person that a life entails, a lifetime’s worth of meals and ablutions, the creation and destruction of small personal items, physical presence, emotional entanglement — none of which ever actually took place, but all of which are implied by every moment of the spell’s operation.
This is, of course, the reason that conjuration spells cannot be maintained. Reality is remarkably tolerant of local stresses, but the longer a conjuration continues, the greater the weight of the paradox of the inconsistency; the sheer vastness of counterfactuals exerts increasing arcane pressure. The conjuration spell itself is usually the weakest part in the paradoxical contraption; the strain breaks it, and the universe resolves the paradox by returning the conjured item to mere potentiality.
Emperor Solemnity-of-Distant-Bells-Across-Snow banned the spell, which remained officially illegal though illicitly popular throughout the dynasty, after the famous military disaster at the Fortress of Blue Foxes in the Year of Ten Generals. Court sorceror Descending-a-Staircase-Disrobed fled ahead of the Imperial occupation, leaving behind what the invading army believed to be her principal wife. Descending-a-Staircase-Disrobed had deliberately made the conjuration robust enough to withstand a week of interrogation concerning their supposed life together, the sorceror’s activities and whereabouts; after which time, the simple strain of maintaining these superposed realities, one true, one fictional, fractured not the spell but the very arcane substructures underlying local reality. The Fortress of Blue Foxes, notoriously, flooded with tens of thousands of hungry ghosts; experienced a state of general suspension of the normal rules of cause, effect, subjectivity and objectivity; and the still somewhat-operating conjuration spell itself attempted to discharge its ostensible purpose by possessing the physical fabric of the castle and several miles of surrounding countryside.
Fully a third of the invading army was fucked to death in the aftermath, and many of the survivors were changed forever by their experiences. As a fighting force, the army was conclusively broken and routed; the fate of General Cold-of-Metal-Upon-the-Skin, located at the epicenter at the moment of onset, was never conclusively determined.
The attention the disaster brought to the technical construction of everyday arcana can be partially credited for the line of research that led to the development of the paradox-fusible arcane failsafe, now routinely incorporated in diverse enchantments in order to preserve health and safety in the event of malfunction[....]
