14 KiB
[RT] Glimwarden, Chapter 9
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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Score: 42
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Created: 2016-07-15T20:19:09
Post:
Comments:
u/CouteauBleu [+19] We are the Empire. (an hour later)
... did... what... why... DID YOU JUST RISK FALLING TO YOUR DEATH JUST TO HAVE A LOOK AT THE TOWN'S SURROUNDINGS?
I like that Sander's thought process waking up is "Hey, what did I miss while I was unconscious?" Then, "Wait, I was unconscious?"
I wonder what Philip thought of Sander's digression about people being a bunch of stories and narratives that disappear when both you and the people who knew you die.
"Experimentation couldn't hurt." It totally can! Stop thinking that way!
Wow... Sander sounds a lot less badass when your realize how much effort the Glimwardens had to make to keep him alive. Though I wouldn't say his contribution to the fight was actually negative, since he saved Philip's live, therefore preserving one of the town's protagonists, but still.
One the one hand, it's kind of heartwarming to see Sander apologize to his dad and promises to be a coward next time... but on the other hand, the way The Reckoning put it, an idiot cannot actually promise to not be an idiot anymore. And Sander does risk his life pointlessly in the next hour.
I feel like Sander is slowly getting a better understanding of Philip, and noticing how socially optimized he is. That might be me projecting, though.
The engineer is funny "Yeah, so your father and Linwell just called me an idiot. Well, not literally, but it's the thought that counts". I hope we'll get to see more of him.
Okay, so the logistics make some sense, but it seems like a bit of a failure from Light's Hollow that no one has seriously considered non-glimwarden defenses before. Even if bullets are too expensive for a minigun, you can have single-shot rifles, or even bows, crossbows, ballistae and other long-range defenses, that can double as apparatus for safe-ish hunting. Also, Sander should not have been the first person trying to figure out a way to mine sulfur.
I like how Philip implies that the only reason he is letting Sander in on the secret is that he expects it will probably be out anyway before Sander inevitably says something he shouldn't. Kind of a Prisoner's Dilemma defection, though.
Falling with style really isn't something Sander should have improvised. At the very least, he should have double-checked his equation on paper, asked Meryl how high a fall someone with his bind could take without injury, and probably do a test run at a lesser height. And then he wonders why Philip isn't impressed with him.
The whole thing might have looked pretty weird to Philip, by the way. You have a guy who disappears, reappear in the sky, falls increasingly fast towards the ground, and when you think he's going to impact the ground, blinks out twice and falls safely.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+23] Finally, everyone was working together. (3 hours later)
In classic rational-protagonist fashion, Wisdom is Sanders' dump stat.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+7] Mouse Army (11 hours later)
But he has the quirky inventor feat alright. The sulfur/hot water insight seems obvious in retroperspective but its really not.
u/alexanderwales [+16] Time flies like an arrow (6 hours later)
Also, Sander should not have been the first person trying to figure out a way to mine sulfur.
For what it's worth, what Sander describes here is (part of) the Frasch process. Prior to that, the major source of sulfur was from from Sicily, where it was mined in mostly terrible conditions. The history of that method of sulfur extraction is basically:
- 1867: Sulfur deposits are discovered in Louisiana during a survey of the state's oil and mineral wealth.
- 1870: A company is formed to lease the rights to mine sulfur.
- Through the 70s and 80s, people try to dig shafts to get at the sulfur, all of which fail due to the hazardous terrain.
- 1890: One last attempt at digging a shaft results in the deaths of five men. Frasch comes along and declares that he's got this new method of sulfur extraction, which he'll share for a fifty-fifty split. The American Sulphur Company agrees.
- 1894: After four years of working out the kinks, Frasch finally gets his process working and the sulfur starts flowing.
- 1903: The process becomes economical due to an influx of oil to the region.
In the real world, it took about twenty years of people trying to mine the sulfur before a master of chemical and industrial engineering came along to innovate things (more, if we consider that other sulfur deposits which had been mined for centuries also benefited from the process).
(In the modern day, most sulfur comes from refinement of petroleum byproducts.)
u/CouteauBleu [+8] We are the Empire. (13 hours later)
Stop spoiling my rants about lack of hypercompetency in rational fiction with your pesky "real life" stories!
u/RMcD94 [+5] (15 hours later)
Simply change the rant to be about Sanders hypercompentency instead
u/DaystarEld [+13] Pokémon Professor (6 hours later)
You wonder what Phillip was thinking as Sander talked about people being amalgamations of stories, and I do too, but what really amuses me is thinking of what he thought when Sander was disappearing up, then falling to his death. Probably something like:
Where is he now? Is he going to reappear sometime soon? I still don't see him... oh, maybe he went up. Yes, there he is. He's falling rather fast. Did he mean to do that? Should I try to catch him? No, it would just kill me too, or seriously maim me, and he'd probably die anyway. I wonder what I'll say if he dies. "There was no reasoning with him" works, but I might still be blamed by his father. Maybe I should step back in case he splatters...
u/DaystarEld [+6] Pokémon Professor (6 hours later)
Aaand this is why I said "Fuck. Yes." to finding out that Sanders's power was teleportation. Flying is the least of it, with the conservation of momentum unless Phillip or Merry get some seriously good powers Sanders is definitely going to be the "muscle" of the trio.
Enjoyed the chapter a lot, and the engineer character. I'm starting to write Bill, and find that "eccentric engineers" is a character trope I've been craving more of. Hope to see more of him soon.
u/RMcD94 [+2] (15 hours later)
He teleports his clothes and things he is holding so, teleport above a schism while holding a huge object, let go of the object, teleport away.
u/NoYouTryAnother [+5] (17 hours later)
He seems to be drained of bind by an amount proportional to the amount of mass he moves (amongst other factors like velocity gain, etc.) So it may not be possible for him to safely teleport something as large as the schism.
u/RMcD94 [+1] (18 hours later)
Not teleport a schism, teleport a house or a boulder or a lantern above the schism. Let gravity do the rest. If it does use up the bind then yeah, that could be an issue. He should start teleporting naked, and go on a diet and shave if that's the case.
Not sure if he could teleport darklings.
u/NoYouTryAnother [+1] (19 hours later)
Ah, read your comment too soon after waking up. Yeah, I suppose dropping a heavy object from up high should work.
A handful of body-weight jumps of high to moderate height drained about 100 hearts from him, so his ability to drop very heavy things from very high up just may be sufficient to get a few tries off.
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (2 days later)
I am very, very surprised that no one in all of these threads has mentioned The Painted Man by Peter Brett (also titled The Warded Man). I get serious rhyming vibes between these two stories, which share many strengths in common.
I just read all nine chapters for the first time and have some thoughts on writing style, but I don't know if you're actually interested in them? i.e. they're things I think could be improved, but arguably the "improvements" would be a lateral move and not an actual increase in quality, depending on what sort of feel you're going for. I jotted down a few from earlier chapters; two are below (plus a third that was just awesome) to give you a sense of whether this is the sort of critique you'd like to hear more of.
He decided that he wasn’t really hungry, only nervous and trying to delay himself from doing something he’d already committed to.
I think this moment would be better expanded (shown instead of told), so that we hear Sander’s “voice” reaching that conclusion, rather than the narrator’s.
There was a disorder here, but it was an ordered disorder, chaos constrained by complex rules too deep for any person to understand, try as they might. It was explicable in theory, not in practice, and so held a deeper allure than what passed for beauty back in town.
There’s a thing going on here where the narrator is … dignifying? … the character’s thought, I think—where Sander’s thoughts are this complex and interesting, but he doesn’t quiiite think them in these specific words so much as through feelings and impressions and simple grammar. I’d love for that to be highlighted, somehow? To point out that Sander doesn’t use these words, but his thoughts are nevertheless this nuanced (because if he does use these words, he becomes an unrealistically high falutin’ character, but if he doesn’t, then he’s just perceptive and the narrator’s doing us a Real Service).
It wasn’t even doing that much to pretend to be.
Awesome.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (2 days later)
Thanks for the comment. I do find it useful. I'm still trying to find the balance on conveying characters' thoughts; italics are literal and everything else is paraphrased. I'm also struggling a bit with how much to leave unsaid. I like to have motivations and thought processes be implicit, but then sometimes people don't understand or pick up on what I was trying to convey, so it's hard to know whether that was a failure of showing or a case where telling was actually appropriate.
Writing is hard.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (2 days later)
Indeed. FWIW, this is solid overall—I'm more twitchy at the difference between A- and A than I would be at the difference between D+ and C-.
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (3 days later)
If you're interested in a really really ridiculously high-quality example of how to dip into and out of a character's inner monologue/how to handle narrative shifts, reread Gary Paulsen's Hatchet with that in mind. To this day I still learn stuff about writing from it.
u/thecommexokid [+4] (an hour later)
"He wasn’t actually any stronger"
(…4 paragraphs…)
"The bind made him stronger"
u/Solonarv [+8] Chaos Legion (8 hours later)
I read this as "the bind doesn't technically make him stronger, but it assists his movement, so it effectively does make him stronger". Much like a suit of power armor, without the armor part.
u/TheLeo3314 [+3] (an hour later)
"'Melting point of sulfur is just a bit higher than water, right?' asked Sander."
Am I misinterpreting that or is your physics just different?
I thought the inverse cubed fall-off for the lanterns was weird (magnetic dipole maybe?) but I guess this worlds physics doesn't have to match ours.
Edit: nevermind I figured out what you meant :P
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (2 hours later)
I'll change that to "The melting point of sulfur is just a bit higher than the melting point of water" for clarity, assuming that was what tripped you up.
u/TheLeo3314 [+11] (2 hours later)
Well now I'm more confused. Wouldn't it be the boiling point of water?
Not sure why I'm fixating on this, it's so minor.
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (2 hours later)
Ah shit, you're right. Your confusion makes a lot more sense now.
Edit: Fixed now.
u/TheLeo3314 [+2] (14 hours later)
My confusion never makes sense. But thanks for helping me retain my sanity.
u/None [+2] (7 days later)
You're portraying Sander's voice very distinctly here:
"“Why are you here?” asked Sander."
-super blunt, not overly concerned with social niceties.
But I fear you went a little over the top with the vulnerability Sander is displaying when he talks about equations to Philip. He is revealing what amounts to part of his life story to Philip-- should be just do so that easily?
I'm a bit confused here:
"But that wasn’t quite the right way to put it, because the increase in bind was now a part of him, forever. At least, until the next time he ran ahead of his recharge rate."
Does this mean that as you get more hearts, you get permanently stronger, but you still need to fill up on a certain # of hearts?
I'm also really confused by how his teleportation works, but I'm assuming we'll get a little more explanation later.
Overall, I like the Philip and Sander interaction, though I think Sander is a little over the top in his vulnerability in this chapter.