1.2 MiB
[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread
-
Author: u/AutoModerator *
-
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4x2jy5/d_wednesday_worldbuilding_thread/
-
Score: 11
-
Created: 2016-08-10T15:04:45
Post:
Welcome to the Wednesday thread for worldbuilding discussions!
/r/rational is focussed on rational and rationalist fiction, so we don't usually allow discussion of scenarios or worldbuilding unless there's finished chapters involved (see the sidebar). It is pretty fun to cut loose with a likeminded community though, so this is our regular chance to:
- Plan out a new story
- Discuss how to escape a supervillian lair... or build a perfect prison
- Poke holes in a popular setting (without writing fanfic)
- Test your idea of how to rational-ify Alice in Wonderland
Or generally work through the problems of a fictional world.
^(Non-fiction should probably go in the Friday Off-topic thread, or Monday General Rationality)
Comments:
u/AmeteurOpinions [+12] Finally, everyone was working together. (51 minutes later)
- Test your idea of how to rational-ify Alice in Wonderland
I stand by my earlier notion that a protagonist suitable for a ratfic of Alice in Wonderland is a poet, even if one's immediate thought for "Rational Alice" is some kind of psychologist.
u/Chronophilia [+7] sci-fi ≠ futurology (3 hours later)
That's a damn good thread, by the way. Everyone go and read it again.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+7] Finally, everyone was working together. (4 hours later)
One day I'm going to write a really, really long essay on that topic, and all shall love me and despair.
u/Dwood15 [+2] (2 days later)
You should write a chapter of this and how a poet would act differently in some of the situations Alice found herself in.
u/None [+6] (6 hours later)
Radiohumans. Humanity evolved with the ability to communicate radio signals with each other, generating radio traffic and such.
I don't have even rudimentary knowledge of radio physics, but I imagined that it will have profound effect on civilization.
Human beings will have to organize and solve problem regarding radio interference in a town, for example.
Ancient warfare also involved electronic warfare, with radio screamers disrupting communication on the other side. Combat is much more fluid with real-time coordination being done by radio.
Technology will advance faster simply due to more communication.
Some humans will figure out how to communicate using the ionosphere, creating a global communication network even before the age of sail.
u/Chronophilia [+7] sci-fi ≠ futurology (7 hours later)
I think the effect might not be as profound as you think. It's just ordinary talking, except "louder" - you can be radio-heard at longer ranges.
Radio waves are not unlike sound waves. They decay following the inverse-square law, and are also naturally deflected or absorbed by certain materials. Waves pass through one another, interfering but not interacting. Probably the biggest difference is that radio is effectively instantaneous while sound is limited to ~300m/s.
I said radio was longer-range than sound, but that really depends on how "loud" it is and how sensitive your "hearing" is. Depending on exactly how it works, the effective range could be, well, anything. For all I know it could be shorter-range than talking. Longer-range isn't necessarily better, either - as you know, if a large crowd all tries to talk at once then you'll be drowned out at more than a few centimetres. That effect would be much worse if your hearing was good enough to pick up noise from an entire city.
Another question is how wide the bandwidth that people can perceive, and how well they can distinguish between similar frequencies. The more sounds you can distinguish, the better you can pick out one person's voice from a crowd.
I don't think we'd see electronic warfare or battlefield-wide coordination, at least no more or less than we do in reality. Screaming at the enemy is not known to disrupt their conversation.
At least there aren't many natural sources of radio waves. I think it's just lightning bolts. No need for "ear protection" when doing, say, construction work.
u/Gaboncio [+4] (12 hours later)
Actually, I don't think that the speed of light and the speed of sound are all that different for the purposes of human communication. They're both much faster than literally any other relevant speed in normal life.
It would be weird to be able to hear clearly through most of our walls. Maybe these people would build with rebar a lot quicker than us?
u/Gaboncio [+5] (7 hours later)
Ouch. Some first impressions:
Human bodies are equipped with some magical HAM radios? You have to pick the scope of the power before doing anything else.
Do you basically just want to write a story where all humans are telepathic without saying telepathy?
Radio technology is mostly used to transmit sound. If we had the ability to communicate on the radio since birth (or before), would our languages even use sound? Seems unlikely, depending on how the magic works.
If humans have this ability, did we evolve it? Were we granted it through divine intervention (or aliens)? If we evolved it, to what extent can other animals use this? How does that affect animal-human relations?
Even though we knew about radios and how they work, it took us a lot of time and theoretical plasma physics research to even attempt to use the ionosphere as a reflector for sending messages across the horizon. Even if we discovered it through trial and error, what makes you think any human body could produce the kind of transmitting/receiving power necessary to make this work?
Lastly, even though humans can currently hear more than one conversation at a time, we have a very hard time actually interpreting them and carrying out two conversations simultaneously. The sort of mass communication/coordination in battle that you're thinking of would be very hard to achieve through magic telepathy. In the middle of a pitched battle between two armies, the only difference between the light and sound is how easily light can propagate through it. Even then, if you put a bunch of radio transceivers in one place and have them all try to communicate with each other at the same time, you get the same problems than if you have a bunch of people in a room (or a battlefield) together and have them yell at the same time.
In conclusion: how would you make this different than having super-hearing, and how would you get around human processing power limitations?
u/Aabcehmu112358 [+2] Utter Fallacy (9 hours later)
From the conversation on the discord server, I can answer some of these.
There was discussion about the possible non-development of audible language. There wasn't a conclusion, that I saw anyway. Personally, I think the development of audible language is still probable, but I may be misjudging it.
While the reason why humans develop radio-hearing is magical (Or at least, we haven't figured out how or why humans would evolve it. There was some mention of this being on another planet with more metal-rich surface soil, but it was still supposed to be about humans? So I don't know.), exactly how we radio-hear is not. I believe the general consensus was that humans have four antennae embed in their humeri and radii bones, with a couple bundles of electroceptive neurons in the elbow, and stacks of current-generating muscles in the upper torso.
I don't know the science behind how much energy it would take, being filtered through the human metabolic process, to generate a particular amplitude or frequency of radio waves. Abstractly, I assume the maximum amplitudes and frequency would be subject to improvement through training, under the model of the it being powered by muscular action.
The ability to disrupt other people's communication (and in particular, only other people's) is probably fantastical, yes. But does mean that, in the future when radio technology external to the human body arises, it becomes another thing that could be disrupted, along with audio-hearing and sight.
u/Gaboncio [+2] (12 hours later)
This is really interesting.
I was thinking about how difficult it would be to biologically produce currents complicated enough to encode audio information in, but then realized that I was comig at this from the wrong angle. The problem isn't "let's make an organism that can support a literal radio," it's "given an organism that can power two arm antennae and transmit through them: can it develop an effective language?" I think the answer is... "Maybe?"
Firstly, I think the sensitivity functions for humans would be highly variable, depending on arm length (pending a radio expert to confirm this is how antennae work), and may even homogenize height in successful civilizations. Depending on how sharply peaked (i.e. limited to a certain range of frequencies) the sensitivity functions are, you may get isolated settlements being unable to really radiotalk to each other. That would be like finding a group of people who speak in ultrasound!
Second, if we have dynamically rearrangeable antennae as transceivers... I don't really know enough about radio communication to say anything, but I can imagine you'd get some interesting things happening. I think that having frequency modulation happen via arm movement would be the easiest way to get a simple biocircuit to be able to transmit enough information to have a meaningful language.
A fun point to think about, if speaking/listening require us to rearrange our antennae, the phrase "body language" takes on a whole new meaning.
Maybe some improvement on an individual's loudness and frequency range can be made through practice, but we can only do that with our voices because the system is so deliciously complicated. I fear that an implementation of the current-generating muscles that is complicated enough to work like human voices would be unrealistic to the point of being indistinguishable from a black box. As an aside, I'm under the impression that most researchers are baffled by the cochlea and would love to have a radio equivalent.
I'm still geeking out over this and I hate it.
u/None [+2] (12 hours later)
I choose radio because I know there's things you can or can't do with radio.
The problem is that I don't know enough physics to lay out the full implication accurately.
If I were writing a story, I would choose something much less complicated with made-up rules I can reason about, until I become knowledgable with physics.
u/ulyssessword [+4] (9 hours later)
What are the specs on the radiohumans? Having internal shortwave capabilities is a lot different than bluetooth capabilities.
u/trekie140 [+5] (an hour later)
If there's one universe begging for fanfiction it's Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The setting is a world where literally all fiction is true. ALL OF IT! It's the ultimate crossover universe where any and every story is connected and ripe for rational analysis. The original comic even does it with its reimagining of classic characters and bizarre yet logical background where everything is true.
u/Escapement [+5] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (7 hours later)
I think that having things opened up too much is probably an impediment to fanfiction at least as much as it is an aide. Writing in multiversal 'everything including the kitchen sink' settings are a lot like writing original settings - a setting where anything can happen and anyone can turn up, basically contains the same complete absence of information as a featureless void. You have to make the same decisions of what you include, what you don't include, etc. that you would if you were just straight up writing original fiction. Having everything in a setting means your setting is very poorly defined.
Another setting that does the same sort of thing (multiversal setting that includes everything and has basically no fanfiction) is the Chronicles of Amber (where literally all imaginable worlds exist, including Alice in Wonderland and Arthurian Myth).
u/trekie140 [+1] (9 hours later)
This fanfic does a pretty good job with it by embracing the high concept absurdity. The chapter I linked to features Astro Boy and Speed Racer a fighting Cthulhu's army of mind controlled kaiju with magical reinforcements in the form of Sam from Bewitched and Rod Sterling from The Twilight Zone. I don't care if that sentence is so insane the character literally named the Cyborg Samurai seems mundane by comparison, simply reading it brings me joy.
u/MagicWeasel [+5] Cheela Astronaut (9 hours later)
I've been thinking about my vampires a lot this week, though I've never shared anything in a worldbuilding thread before. They're part of a roleplaying universe I co-created, so it's not rational per sae but I like to make it 'as rational as possible'.
The vampires are pretty typical, burning in the sun, needing to be invited into human dwellings, etc. They can also create ghouls by feeding them vampire blood, and humans who are fed upon become addicted to the rush of being eaten from, so many vampires keep a 'herd' of humans who are so addicted.
I've been thinking about their society. I definitely want them to have very rigid customs and social norms, with huge symbolism (e.g. the exact shade of red of the shirt you wear to a meeting has a very particular meaning). They also have a gift-giving culture, where you give gifts to your superiors and inferiors, again with heavy symbolism. For example, a vampire character incorrectly thought someone else was a vampire and gave her a suite of gifts. She didn't accept an ancient warhammer that had belonged to his grandson because she thought it was too extravagant a gift; naturally, the vampire took the refusal of the gift as an indication that she rejects his lineage and does not believe he is able to fight with his own two hands.
Also, vampires, being better than humans in strength, speed, etc I feel are also naturally better at thinking. They get stronger the older they are, and so I think they should get smarter the older they are.
With that background, here's my notes on vampire society in general. I'd love any criticism, input, expansions, or corollaries you guys might be able to input. In particular, given how intelligent vampires are, I can't figure out why they haven't just scienced the shit out of everything centuries ago and now we live in a post-singularity world.
As vampires are naturally quite vicious and ruthless, prehistoric vampire society was kill or be killed, vicious.
As time went on, society became more rigid. Enforced rules of politeness and restraint allowed vampires to function without killing each other.
These rules became more and more complicated due to a vampire’s high cognitive capacity, with different shades of meaning encoded in gifts, letters, handwriting, clothing, etc.
Part of their dispute resolution process does involve combat. This is because they are stubborn and proud. Usually, the threat of death is enough to make one of the vampires reneg; in fact, that’s generally how these things go.
They tend to have a meritocracy/gerontocracy where the oldest and therefore wisest run the show. As a result, everyone likes to imply that they are older than they are.
The rules and mores of vampire society spread easily, as vampires live a long time and have long memories.
Vampires have art and music, far beyond anything a mortal can comprehend. One of the most famous vampire-composed operas goes for two straight weeks, and has over a hundred characters. There are shades of foreshadowing and meaning that slowly crystallise together, mostly by the viewer’s own intuition; everything is implied very loosely and delicately.
Some vampires are also interested in science; most modern scientific and technological advances were made by vampires, ghouls working on behalf of vampires, or were “accidentally discovered” (penicillin) because of vampires.
u/CCC_037 [+4] (17 hours later)
In particular, given how intelligent vampires are, I can't figure out why they haven't just scienced the shit out of everything centuries ago and now we live in a post-singularity world.
They're ancient and mostly set in their ways. With their long lifespans, they don't much like change and tend to nostalgically yearn for the "good old days" before all this pollution and overpopulation and other negative consequences of civilisation. While some of them do scientific research, and tend to discover things first, they are reluctant to share these things with mortals (on the basis that mortals already took the internal combustion engine and wrecked the countryside with it).
Also, humans dramatically outnumber them. A vampire may create an elegant design that works brilliantly and build (say) his own personal supercomputer - but their tendency to secrecy means that he'll only build one, for his own use; he won't build ten thousand and sell them (and hence vampires would never invent the internet). And he'll likely treat it as a mere curiousity, and not share the design with the other vampires (perhaps thinking they'll have more fun figuring out how it was done than if he tells them). Net result? A couple of hundred human scientists communicating and sharing results will outpace any amount of vampires, given long enough. (However, the vampires also get to read the humans' communication, so their technology is consistently about a decade more advanced than what anyone else has got - two decades when it comes to environmental friendliness).
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (18 hours later)
Thankyou so much for your thoughts! I really love what you've proposed, and it fits well with the established mythology - they are indeed very independent and not given to teamwork.
I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. Thanks again!
u/CCC_037 [+2] (20 hours later)
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
Not gonna lie it's pretty great to be able to post about vampire society in a subreddit full of clever people who are willing to help work it out.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a day later)
Of course, the really interesting thing about vampire society - traditionally speaking - is that they reproduce by turning their prey into more of them. A predator turning the occasional prey into more predators has all sorts of consequences...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
Fortunately, My Vampires Are Different - turning someone into a vampire can't happen by accident. You have to basically open their chest, vomit a weird blood-like paste into their heart, and leave them out of the sun for a day or two in order for it to work. So very few new ones get made, thankfully. It's mostly young ones wanting to create peers so they can hunt in packs for protection from their elders, or vampires who want to keep a friend or lover with them.
The other big problem I'm having with my vampires is they have three distinct food sources:
People they hunt and kill in the traditional vampirey way
What we've named jannisaries, who are addicted to the experience of being fed on, since it releases endorphins, adreneline, etc in humans. Typical sort of addict personality. They usually continue to live their own lives and just seek the vampire out for scheduled feedings. Some vampires will eat from them unsustainably, but the wisest ones know roughly how much they can get away with taking, though this still shortens the jannisaries life span.
Ghouls, humans who have been fed vampire blood and gain up to a max of, say, 10% of the vampire's strength/healing ability over the course of several months before reaching a plateau. The vampire blood makes them completely subservient to the vampire. Vampires can feed from ghouls, and though they require a few drops of blood every day or so, canonically, at least, in my mind, a vampire can feed from a ghoul more than often enough to counteract this modest loss.
What I'm trying to figure out is - why would a vampire not just make a herd of ghouls, keep them in a basement somewhere, and feed from them? Why have jannisaries at all? Jannisarries are uncontrolled, often unpredictable, and have been known to attack vampires to force them to feed. They are a security breach. And yet, vampires for some reason seem to have a lot of them. Ghouls are better in every way.
Should I just retcon it and say having a ghoul is a net loss of blood, because the amount they must drink to sustain themselves? Or is the logistics of keeping ghouls prohibitive, since you have to bring them human food, dispose of their bodily waste, etc (except, being slaves, you can just order them to do that for themselves)? Does keeping ghouls under control require the use of mental focus that means keeping more than 1 for every 500 years of age you have just takes too much of your brain so you wouldn't be able to control them effectively?
I tend to lean towards the 'ghouls use psychic energy' school of thought, but it still bugs me.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a day later)
Ghouls! Dear me, how unfashionable! Not to mention which, their blank stares tend to creep out anyone and everyone... alright, sure, they have their uses, but ewwww! And they taste so bland as well!
Now, the occasional hunt is a lot of fun, but somewhat risky, So, ideally, one finds a number of people with interesting and different flavours to their blood, and turns them into jannisarries. A few jannisarries in a position to stomp on any information leaks - news editors and the like, all well aware that any widespread leaks will lead to them being cut off - will take care of most of the security-breach problem, and their ability to actually think for themselves (unlike ghouls) is vital when they're put in a situation they weren't told how to handle...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
I love the spirit of your suggestions! However, I probably misrepresented ghouls - they still retain their original personalities and ability to think creatively / etc, and are able to maintain their human lives if the vampire wishes them to. They just become very suggestible, think of a stage hypnotist, and fiercely loyal. It's more like someone who is unconditionally in love with a vampire, than a zombie that has lost its entire personality.
I love the idea of the vampire blood altering the taste of the ghoul's blood to make it less palatable, but it's still likely going to be better to have a journalist as a ghoul than as a jannisary.
Then again..... a ghoul can be un-ghouled by keeping them away from the vampire for about a week, and they might be disgusted by what they did and turn on the vampire. A jannisary will still be looking for that next high, and while they might sell a vampire out for another vampire's services, there's very little else that would make them want to do so. So, while a jannisary can't be ordered to keep you secret, it's in their interest. On the other hand, a ghoul is bound to you at her very core - until they aren't, and then they are likely to be your biggest enemy. So you would only want to create ghouls you will have complete control over....
u/CCC_037 [+3] (a day later)
Are ghouls suggestible only by the vampire, or by anyone in general (with the vampire taking priority)? In the second case, close friends will no doubt notice the difference. And then there's the bookkeeping, of course... having to check in on them once a week is such an annoying chore... at least jannisseries are still okay if you get a bit wrapped up in a project and lose track of time...
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
The ghouls are suggestible only to the vampire, so it's not too bad. Family and friends likely wouldn't notice anything is off.
And yeah, keeping ghouls fed while you're off at one of those two week long vampire operas is a bit risky, though obviously they have intermissions for such things as the requisite sleeping during daylight, having a snack, etc.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (a day later)
And there's another reason not to have too many ghouls - if you want to have a three-week holiday in Paris, you've got to drag them all along with you. It's like a puppy - cute as it might look, you've actually got to work a bit to care for it. Not as much as a puppy, but still...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
I can just imagine it.... You go on holiday, decide to chain your ghoul up under the care of a jannisary while you're gone so you can re-brainwash them when you return. Come home to find all your shit wrecked and vampire hunters lying in wait for you. Not a fun end to a relaxing two months in Brunei.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a day later)
Not to mention which, your journalist ghoul has just had a two-month absence from work - which means that, even in the best scenario, he's probably been replaced. Which means you've either got to look after him, despite him no longer being useful, or kill him, which is messy (and modern forensics makes that a pain to do without causing more trouble)
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
Indeed... if you want a ghoul with connections, you have to babysit them like nobody's business. Better to just have a ghoul butler who is cut off from their family and goes everywhere with you. Easy enough to kill if you get sick of them, some muscle when you need it, and someone to watch over you when you sleep during the day.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a day later)
A much better use of ghouls, yes!
Not that it's not still a great big mess when you need to kill them. These days, you need to send the guy up a building to scream some girl's name while jumping off in front of a hundred witnesses... and no matter what you do, these guys in these ridiculous little blue hats with horrible little red-and-blue lights on their cars soon turn up and start poking through everything connected with him... and they keep trying to interrupt you during the day, too...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
Ah... but all you need to do is grab one, take a sip, and you may have just made yourself a new jannisary.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a day later)
And that deals with one of them, yes, but there's hundreds. And you can't turn them all into jannisaries.
...alright, you can, but only if you intend to spend just about every waking hour for the next several years feeding from them. You can certainly say goodbye to your diet if you go that route. Ugh. Better to just wait them out, they go away on their own in a month or two if they don't find anything.
You did clean up, right?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (3 days later)
Well, you know, normally my ghoul keeps things straight and tidy for me. He used to be a detective, don't you know. It was all... a bit inconvenient when it didn't work out.
Well, I had a great time in Brunei, and the guys there liked me well enough. I might hang out back there for a few years, let it blow over.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (3 days later)
Ugh, you're going to have to forge all sorts of paperwork. ot to mention, all your lab projects will have to be packed up and moved. It's all bother, bother, bother.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (4 days later)
And that is why I should have just taken my damn ghoul to Brunei with me in the first place. Ah well, you live, you learn don't ya?
u/CCC_037 [+3] (4 days later)
Oh dear. I, um, how embarrassing. I've just realised that, according to my current ID, I'm now ninety-three years old but still look twenty. I do seem to have lost track of time somewhat. I'll need to move and create a new identity as well... sigh, more bother...
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (4 days later)
You can avoid this problem by fabricating a 'home birth' (they're all the rage, now, don't you know!) every forty years or so.
Myself, I've found little need to show up on official documents. If I wish to travel I send myself as cargo, and you can easily use property that belongs to one of your many human slaves. It's what they're for, after all!
u/CCC_037 [+2] (4 days later)
Yes, with one of your ghouls signing on as the other parent. It can work, but you have to fill in all sorts of forms with regard to homeshooling yourself, and every so often some overbusy social worker tries to talk to child-you - sometimes it's just easier to move to a new country, make a jannissary or a ghoul out of whoever maintains the local Department of Home Affairs and have him fabricate a new identity for you.
Besides, the occasional change of scenery is probably good for me.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (4 days later)
You gotta be careful when moving, though. If you're not well-known as a powerful creature, you wind up having to insert yourself into the local community, often by force. Etiquette requires, after all, that you send appropriate flocks of birds in advance of your arrival, or you may be seen as doing something... uncouth.
Then again, if you see a city controlled by a young, weak vampire, you can always go in and make it your own. That can get messy, so dress appropriately.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (4 days later)
Or we could handle this by mutual agreement - I find another vampire who also wants to move, and we swap. One advantage of this is that we each end up with a network of jannissaries around to help us settle in.
I'm going to post a carefully encrypted craigslist advert...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (4 days later)
If you want to do that, fine. My sense of style is too refined to take up residence in someone else's discarded abode, drink from their cast-offs! Do you know what some vampires give their jannisaries to wear?? Ugh.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (4 days later)
You care what they look like? Why not just give them other stuff to wear? Any that really annoy you, just give them their former patron's new address and send them away.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (4 days later)
What do we have if not for our appearances? Our ability to command respect, to put fear into the hearts of our enemies?
Why, when I go to a new town, the vampires shower me with gifts. Or at least they would, if they knew what was good for them!
u/CCC_037 [+2] (4 days later)
If they knew? Let me guess, you're the sort that goes in on a war footing, shoving people aside, kicking them down, forcing those less powerful than you to give you what you want?
Tut, tut. Bad planning all round.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (4 days later)
More I'm the sort who punishes those who do not offer her the respect that is due. I can hardly be held responsible for their lack of good manners, can I?
u/CCC_037 [+1] (4 days later)
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (4 days later)
Well, if I had neglected to behave with the decorum befitting a lady towards my elders, then I would deserve whatever became of me, naturally.
I don't know who taught you your manners, but it sounds as if your education be wanting.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (4 days later)
I'm an introvert, okay? I spend most of my time locked up in my lab doing experiments and stuff. I don't get out and meet people all that often. So I get by on the basis of not being a bother to anyone and not bothering in return.
Jannissaries and ghouls make great guineapigs, by the way. And not having to worry about ethics boards getting in the way is always a benefit.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (5 days later)
Yes, I know your type. Sit around in the shadows, working on your own projects for a few hundred years, then inevitably you come out into the world with no idea of the proper manners. Combat is the natural result, but your opponent expected a young vampire who has yet to learn rather than an old, experienced, strong vampire who never bothered to learn. Well, their lack of caution was been ill-advised.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (5 days later)
Few hundred? Bah. Short-termers.
I have discovered a number of interesting new stimulants, by the way, compounds that make your average human faster, stronger, and tougher when ingested. Well, temporarily, at least, and the side effects mean you probably don't want to give it to your favourite Jannissaries... I have yet to find one that makes them smarter, mind you, but I can dope up my humans to the point of being able to physically match a vampire for, oh, ten, fifteen minutes?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (6 days later)
Well, fifteen minutes would be more than enough for what you'd need. I'm sure just the threat of such a thing would give you as much influence as you would care to have in all but the most densely populated areas.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (6 days later)
And all I really care about is being left alone to do my research, so win-win, right? No-one bothers me, I don't bother them, and everyone's happy!
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (6 days later)
Yep. But remember, once you've found something that's valuable, there's always a risk of it being taken from you. Stay vigilant!
u/CCC_037 [+2] (6 days later)
My ghouls have their injector packs and their orders. Oh, and I may have lied about it being only fifteen minutes. Do you really think anyone's going to try their luck? Last fellow who tried, I didn't even know he'd attacked until I wanted a cup of tea and my butler didn't answer the ring...
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (6 days later)
Well, like I said, when you get to the point where not only can you power up a jannisary to vampire levels, but you have enough mental energy to control several ghouls, there's probably very few vampires who would stand in your way anyway.
Why don't you get a younger vampire with the appropriate social mores to handle the day-to-day running of your estate? Give them a pack for one ghoul, and you'll have someone who can make all the appropriate social gestures for you, entertain any guests, maintain alliances throughout the country and the world at large, and you will have nary a care in the world.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (6 days later)
Wait, you mean as in... cooperate with someone? My goodness. I would never have considered -
Wait a moment. This has its own troubles, really. Junior would be in a perfect place to quietly, over months, investigate my defenses. Maybe persuade some of my jannissaries to betray me for him. Find a weak point. Go out and talk to someone more powerful than him, sell them the info for a share of the spoils. And, even if he doesn't succeed, he could really mess up my lab by trying. I'm not sure it's worth the risk, really.
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (6 days later)
[](/dashieshrug 'It seems like the most sensible way to go, though all the factors that were covered would impact on the ghoul vs jannisary equation, I feel most comfortable knowing there's also a somewhat hard limit') Well, it was worth a try!
u/CCC_037 [+3] (6 days later)
If it wasn't for the fact that it would take me away from my lab for several days, I might have decided to track you down and express my displeasure...
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (7 days later)
[](/applelaugh 'Yeah, I'm sure even with mental focus as a limit if I said 'come at me bro, munchkin my vampire system' there would be some interesting results, best not make it rely on a combination of fashion, practicality, and loyalty.') And this is why nobody's heard your name before. Stuck in a lab, working on your own projects, not interacting with anyone else.
You wouldn't notice if there was an all-out vampire war. Why, if you had ambition, imagine what you could do?
Wait a second..... Vampires with ambition often lose out to upstarts, usurpers, and hell even an angry jannisary fucking with your curtains can give you a bad time.
Maybe the most ambitious vampires, wanting to live as long as possible, opt for the safety of seclusion.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (7 days later)
Oh, I'm not ambitious at all. What would I even do with power? No, my lab is the only place for me to be.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (7 days later)
u/CCC_037 [+2] (7 days later)
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (7 days later)
[](/ajbaffle 'ITT: I ruin everyone's fun by pointing out it is not compatible with a canon they have had no opportunity to be exposed to.') Why would you offer orange juice to a vampire??? It's tasteless, uncomfortable to drink, and, from what I'm able to gather, probably full of microscopic robots that will kill me from the inside, or for extra style points maybe a nanofactory that will produce your blood cells instead of mine so that way "my" ghouls get habituated to your blood.
From my canon document:
A vampire is unable to eat normal food; he is able to swallow it, but lacks the ability to taste it. He also feels discomfort at having food in his stomach and must throw it up within an hour or so, or he will spit it up involuntarily.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (7 days later)
What? Oh, no, this isn't named after the fruit, it's named after the colour! Don't worry, there's no fruit juice in this at all! Nor are there any nanites, I never quite got the hang of microrobotics. I'm more a chemist than a - nanitist?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (7 days later)
So.... what flavour of mayhem are you hoping to cause me with this colourful beverage?
If you just want me to go, I'd be more than happy to get out of this bland, poorly-decorated excuse of a room and forget I ever met you.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (7 days later)
I actually have no idea what it will do to you. This is an experiment! On the other hand, if you try to leave too early, I do have a pretty good idea what the ultraviolet sunlamps outside this room will do to you...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (7 days later)
Well, looks like I don't exactly have a choice, in that case. Ummm.... bottoms up?
u/CCC_037 [+3] (7 days later)
Excellent! Now, if I've got it right, that should temporarily improve your access to and recall of memories and facts, so for testing purposes, I want you to start reciting information. Let me know if you start feeling any side effects at any point! Let's start with something simple. What are the ways of killing a vampire?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (7 days later)
[](/ajbigeye 'You're a champion! My background document is woefully un-fleshed-out, so it'll be good to get a lot of the headcanon out of the head') Has it made me suggestible too, because I'm totally about to start telling you how to kill me and I don't have any second thoughts whatsoever.
There's really only three ways to kill a vampire, if you're doing it violently. Decapitation, setting them on fire, and of course sunlight.
Decapitation - the brain and the heart are the only important organs in a vampire body. The brain still does all the thinking. Unlike in the former human body, the heart doesn't work as a lowly pump - it's just... a magic nexus or something. Anyway, it's the source of the magic that keeps the course alive, so decapitation seperates the two. It's not enough just to sever all the veins and arteries; the capilliaries and even the interstitial fluid can transmit the 'life energy' from the heart to the brain. So a 'nearly headless nick' situation would be healable for a vampire. Once that last bit of skin is severed, though, brain death is assured.
Fire - For some reason, when a vampire is burned its natural healing abilities do not make short work of the injury. Injuries caused to a vampire by fire will take a long time to heal - longer, even than the same burn would take for a human to heal.
Sunlight - For their first six months or so of undeath, a vampire slowly loses her ability to be in the sun; their first day of unlife will only result in a sensation like a mild sunburn, but progressively they can stand less and less time in the sun. Many a person who can be found staring into the sun is a new vampire with a good mentor, who has told them to treasure the small amount of sunshine they will see over the coming months, because it will be their last. A ten year old vampire can survive in the sun for about two or three minutes; for an ancient vampire, a reflected ray of sunshine would kill them almost instantly. The physical symptoms are of burns but without fire.
Finally, if you're not being violent, they can also starve to death after a fashion - if they're not fed enough, they become mindless automatons searching only for their next meal. This invariably leads to them either getting a snack and returning to normal, or, well, following a rat out into the sun. Usually the latter.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (7 days later)
Right! I'll want to judge the consequences on your reasoning abilities as well, so we're going to discuss this in depth. One at a time.
First, you mention decapitation - that is, severing the heart-brain connection. But there are other ways to mess with those two organs. What about a bullet through the brain, or the ever popular wooden stake through the heart?
On that matter, what exactly happens to a headless vampire? The magic nexus of the heart is still going, albeit undirected by any form of intelligence. Does the remaining body merely grow a new head (complete with blank, infantile brain) and go on a mindless rampage until it runs into sunlight and burns up?
Second, fire. Does it have to be flame, or will any source of heat do? Could one (in theory) kill a vampire with a kettle full of boiling water? (Or several kettlesful?) What about an infrared laser? Molten lava?
Third, sunlight. What is it about sunlight in particular that kills vampires? Ultraviolet light, some magical property, the sun's heat? Whatever it is, can it be blocked by a sufficiently thick layer of sunblock?
Fourthly, let's consider the starving vampire. Is it possible for a vampire to still move, even taking in no new energy? Can I exploit this by chaining up a starving vampire in my basement, putting him in a giant hamster wheel, and dangling a rat in front of him (but out of reach) to get an infinite source of (environmentally-friendly) energy with which to power my lab?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (7 days later)
[](/cheerteach 'Let's see how we go...')
What about a bullet through the brain, or the ever popular wooden stake through the heart?
A stake through the heart paralyses the vampire, world of darkness style. This means that you can behead them at your leisure - or, if you're feeling particularly sadistic, leave them in an open area and wait for sunrise.
As for the bullet to the brain - it depends. If the bullet breaks the physical structure of the skull, head, etc and causes part of the brain to become... detached, then the vampire might heal 'around' it - perhaps giving you a sort of lobotomy, or simply a brain-dead vampire.
On that matter, what exactly happens to a headless vampire? The magic nexus of the heart is still going, albeit undirected by any form of intelligence. Does the remaining body merely grow a new head (complete with blank, infantile brain) and go on a mindless rampage until it runs into sunlight and burns up?
I never thought about that before, but that sounds AWESOME. The canon does have 'vampires are comatose when the sun is up, but can resist it for several minutes with effort' going for it, though, which might make things tricky. Maybe it would be better if the brain-heart connection is the magic itself, it's a ying-yang sort of thing, once they are separated the magic is lost - makes things a lot.... cleaner.
Does it have to be flame, or will any source of heat do?
Flame, I'd say. Boiling water and lasers are no problem. I feel like lava should be a problem but I can't think how it would be a problem but none of the above would be, so, I guess vampires can chill around lava. That actually sounds kind of neat. I'm imagining a pompeii vampire getting encased in hard lava like the folklore tales of frogs emerging, alive and somewhat pissed off, from inside rocks that are split in mines.
Third, sunlight. What is it about sunlight in particular that kills vampires? Ultraviolet light, some magical property, the sun's heat?
The magic, 'spirit', whatever you want to call it of the sun. In my head it's Sol in particular; a vampire can watch the sunrise on Alpha Centauri with no ill effects, though a particularly ancient vampire would have to consult her star charts to ensure that Sol is not visible that night.
Whatever it is, can it be blocked by a sufficiently thick layer of sunblock?
Yes; if vampires can stay indoors and not get burned, there's no reason that sufficiently thick sunblock could not allay the effects. However, for practical purposes, the sunblock would only be useful for very, very young vampires. A vampire that would die after 5 minutes could put SPF 50+ and get maybe 5 minutes and 2 seconds. Sunblock doesn't even block all the types of UV rays, let alone any of the visible light, so the effects would be far more modest than what the SPF would have you believe.
Is it possible for a vampire to still move, even taking in no new energy?
Yes. It's quite concerning that they break the laws of thermodynamics.
giant hamster wheel
The canon document actually specifies that a starved vampire can be awake for 60 seconds at a time in pursuit of prey it senses nearby. Obviously somewhere deep down I was thinking of this; probably I wrote that in because the magical justification would be that the bloodless vamp isn't going to go on an epic quest for a rat, it's going to give up if it's too hard.
Also, it lets us perhaps get away without breaking TOO much thermodynamics, maybe. Perhaps the heart-brain system, which uses human blood as a primary fuel, is also able to use a secondary backup fuel source more or less indefinitely? Or perhaps we shouldn't think too deep about vampires...
u/CCC_037 [+3] (7 days later)
Hmmmm. Paralysis but not death. That fits with vampire myth, yes.
So the brain regenerates from damage, but regenerates in a blank state, leaving the vampire with permanent mental damage. That's fair.
I never thought about that before, but that sounds AWESOME. The canon does have 'vampires are comatose when the sun is up, but can resist it for several minutes with effort' going for it, though, which might make things tricky. Maybe it would be better if the brain-heart connection is the magic itself, it's a ying-yang sort of thing, once they are separated the magic is lost - makes things a lot.... cleaner.
Do you want "clean"? This brainless vampire becomes a mindless but still dangerous beast, moving only at night (and perhaps even instinctively hiding from bright lights) but can still be destroyed by even reflected sunlight. It adds a whole new dimension of terror to vampire hunting; beheading the vampire interrupts all its plans and makes it stupid and animalistic, but it can still kill the hunter. Far better to set up a collection of mirrors and use sunlight to deliver the death blow...
I feel like lava should be a problem but I can't think how it would be a problem but none of the above would be, so, I guess vampires can chill around lava. That actually sounds kind of neat. I'm imagining a pompeii vampire getting encased in hard lava like the folklore tales of frogs emerging, alive and somewhat pissed off, from inside rocks that are split in mines.
I'd imagine that even if it doesn't kill them, lava still really really hurts. Which just makes the trapped vampire even angrier. (Though that might be mitigated by the centuries he spent in complete sensory deprivation driving him insane...)
The magic, 'spirit', whatever you want to call it of the sun. In my head it's Sol in particular; a vampire can watch the sunrise on Alpha Centauri with no ill effects, though a particularly ancient vampire would have to consult her star charts to ensure that Sol is not visible that night.
Huh, now this is interesting. Okay, backstory time; why Sol in particular? What's so special about this sun? What are the odds that vampires would live on a world whose sun is one of the very few things that can utterly, entirely, absolutely and easily destroy them?
(I have some ideas about the answers to those questions...)
It's quite concerning that they break the laws of thermodynamics.
It is indeed, but there's a way around that as well. A starved vampire simply needs to continually take in energy from its surroundings. (This can be accomplished by simply reducing the temperature of said surroundings - never state why, just that everyone too close to the starved vampire feels a chill - which prevents anyone from using vampires to break conservation of energy)
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (8 days later)
Do you want "clean"?
Good point. No, I don't. I'm behind this; they can even be the zombie equivalents of this canon, as I can imagine that the link between vampires and zombiepires is not obvious to people inhabiting the universe. Here's some new canon that this has given me:
- A stake in the torso will freeze them until the stake is removed. It also has the effect of preventing any healing from occurring. It effectively puts them into a state of suspended animation; they will not require food. Some particularly desperate hungry vampires have been known to self-stake.
- Vampire limbs grow back when they’re severed; the magic comes from the heart, and there are risks of starfish-like duplication if the heart is merely cut into pieces instead of burned. (Don’t worry TOO much; if the heart is still inside the torso, it will join back together. But if your bullet to the chest splatters heart matter throughout the room? You’d better burn that shit down or in a few months you’ll have zombie vampires on the loose.)
- An arm will grow back over two or three nights.
- Another huge concern is that a vampire body, after being beheaded, can actually grow an entire new head. The new head starts out bald but will have a decent head of hair after a night or two. The brain is blank, having only the most basic instincts - move towards and eat anything that is full of blood, and avoid bright lights.
- Slayers are advised to behead, stake, and drag vampires into the open to avoid this.
Okay, backstory time; why Sol in particular? What's so special about this sun? What are the odds that vampires would live on a world whose sun is one of the very few things that can utterly, entirely, absolutely and easily destroy them?
I look at it from the other way: what are the odds that a completely different star, with different spectral properties, a different relationship with the planet vampires evolved on, would be able kill them? The thing that's special about this sun is that vampires evolved on a planet that orbits it. I'm not tied to this idea, but I think that if someone was able to make something that exactly imitated all the properties of sunlight, it would not burn the vampire. I'm iffy on mirrors too, but I think that if it can burn through glass or even just the atmosphere then mirrors can't be excluded. The danger is something to do with the 'spiritual nature' of the sun, whatever that means.
I'm also keen to hear your thoughts on this, in case I'm missing something awesome. I never thought that if a vampire could regrow a limb, then a vampire can regrow a blank head, and that's badass.
A starved vampire simply needs to continually take in energy from its surroundings.
Love this. Great for thematic purposes, and vampires are naturally cold (but can probably will their skin to warm up when necessary to maintain their cover).
Thought: those frozen bodies they find in glaciers are vampires every now and again, with predictable results. Team hiking a glacier for science or for sport? Nice snack for an ancient, torpid vampire released from the icy prison of its own making. I'm also imagining a glacier being found in a location where it makes no sense for a glacier to be, with a creamy vampire centre.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (8 days later)
Here's some new canon that this has given me:
Looks good.
I look at it from the other way: what are the odds that a completely different star, with different spectral properties, a different relationship with the planet vampires evolved on, would be able kill them?
Things generally don't evolve vulnerabilities. Dependencies, yes - if vampires required an hour or so of sunlight every day, this argument would be a lot more compelling - but not vulnerabilities.
So. My thoughts. At the moment, you have vampires that can only be permanently stopped by two things; sunlight and fire. Now, a common feature of magic in fiction is the idea that a small thing can somehow hold the essence of a related big thing; Harry Dresden can scry on a model of Chicago; Harry Potter has the Marauder's Map. So it's possible that these two things are in fact one thing; that fire only burns vampires because it has a sympathetic link with the Sun.
So. You have an immortal, near totally invulnerable predator with but a single weakness. Unlike, say, a lion, which can be killed in any of a thousand ways. Vampires did not evolve naturally; they're too far advanced beyond anything else. No, vampires were almost certainly created, by some lost but magically powerful civilisation, as the magical equivalent of a nuke. (Let's call it Atlantis). Way, way back, Atlantis had magicians whose knowledge of magic has been all but lost in modern times, and they had a war; some remnants of their weapons survive to this day, though Atlantis itself does not (the war turned out to be apocalyptic and destroyed pretty much the entire civilisation, possibly even literally wiping it from history).
Perhaps vampires were originally created without the sunlight weakness by one faction; and another faction literally enchanted the Sun into being deadly for these vampires as a defensive move. Or perhaps they were engineered with their solar weakness as a control measure. (Either way, this would imply that a suitably knowledgeable magical practitioner could work out a vampire-killing spell that used no sunlight or fire if he tried. Presumably actual magical practitioners are rare enough to make this a fairly negligible threat to the average vampire - though particularly paranoid ones might go so far as to deliberately hunt down and kill mages just to keep this threat level negligible).
Thought: those frozen bodies they find in glaciers are vampires every now and again, with predictable results.
Bearing in mind that (a) a glacier doesn't just require cold, it requires a whole lot of water and (b) the north and south poles each have close on six months of complete sunlessness (and vampires presumably don't feel the cold) so they're probably vampire holiday homes (and vampires probably sponser arctic and antarctic research stations - or, as they refer to them, "snack boxes").
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (8 days later)
You make some great points! I do love the idea of bringing vampires down into having a single weakness (namely fire).
I like the war story, the sun literally being enchanted as a weapon.
As for existing canon: mages exist, on a spectrum. What you'd think of when you imagine a wizard - casting spells with great acuity - is one in a hundred million and requires a combination of genes and appropriate schooling. Something more along the lines of a magician - able to cast a dozen or so spells to a decent skill level through practise and research, thanks to genes and schooling - is one in a million. One in a thousand are people with small quirks - predictive abilities, the sort you see on Hollywood psychics. One in a hundred are people are people who just seem 'above average', perhaps with really good reflexes, an astonishing memory, or an affinity for mathematics.
The above figures give about 70 top tier mages in the world today, which is not unreasonable IMO. Atlantis could have had better schools and a deeper mage gene pool (breeding programs, maybe? or just founder effect - perhaps it was founded by a few exiled wizards)
u/CCC_037 [+2] (8 days later)
Hmmmm. Alright, let's briefly consider magic. Using it offers considerable advantages to the user; we can therefore expect that those with better access to magic will, on average, have more descendants than those that do not. Even at the "small quirk" or "above average" level, that's enough to produce a slight evolutionary pressure in the direction of being more magical.
This would imply that a number of animals would evolve magical abilities (mostly at the "small quirk" or "above average" level). We're not talking dragons here; more along the lines of supernaturally fast jackalopes or a large Himalayan ape with the ability to turn invisible.
Now, the "ancient war" idea relies on Atlantis having had some serious magic. Up to the point where comparing an Atlantean mage to a modern mage is like comparing Richard Feynman to Plato; they definitely fit in the same category, but one is an accomplished professional with a thorough education while the other is making a few steps in the direction of developing the beginnings of that education. I'm thinking Atlantis was probably ruled by a few families of magic users (or possibly even one family that had an internal feud at the end) - they somehow made magic their exclusive property, tied to their family bloodline and not available to those not related to them. (This means that the "magic genes", so to speak, imply that one is descended from one of these Atlantean mage-kings). This leaves open the possibility of finding the occasional, very very rare, exceedingly powerful Atlantean magical artifact, which cannot be replicated without a thorough understanding of the magic that went into the artifact's creation... which doesn't come with instructions and may or may not have limited charges...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (8 days later)
Even at the "small quirk" or "above average" level, that's enough to produce a slight evolutionary pressure in the direction of being more magical.
Ooo! I should say that one of the small quirk type guys experiences awful headaches and frequent nose bleeds in conjunction with his powers (accurate prediction of the future that's somewhat random, sometimes can be the entire strategy for an enemy attorney, sometimes is just the desire to buy a particular type of tea so that way, two weeks later when someone asks for it, he doesn't need to leave the office to get any for her). So.... there's probably trade offs.
The magician doesn't seem worse off for her powers, though.
Another character is at the 'above average reflexes' level, from a family of Chinese kung fu masters that are assisted by this magic, which might make the 'descendants of atlantis' theory less tenable (actually - he's the cousin of the magician, so atlantis could easily have been in ancient china....). The powers are passed down the male line, though they're not exclusive to men - a woman with the powers will have the augmented abilities, but will not pass them down to her sons, while a man will pass them down to his sons and daughters. So it's not just simply y-linked, it's somehow more complicated than that.
A lot of skill is related to teaching, though, so Atlantis wouldn't need to keep control of the genes - they could just seek control of the teaching. I think it's implied that someone could 'jump up a tier' just by having better access to teachers. Love the ideas of artefacts and lost knowledge, though!
Magic not spreading hugely through the gene pool is a huge problem. Easy way out is to say the genes also have a negative effect on fertility.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (8 days later)
there's probably trade offs.
Hmmm. The Atlantean mages would have liked vision-of-the-future, but not the side effects. This implies that perhaps his genetics are not quite perfect - he is, in effect, unlocking one function of magic but doing it wrong. (Like holding a broken torch that shocks you when you turn it on - you push the switch, and get light and a shock. But someone with a properly working torch would just get the light.)
I'm thinking the ancient Atlantean mage-kings would have had all of the magical talents and none of the negative effects. (Yes, yes, massively overpowered, but you can do that in the distant past.) Presumably even some control over what part of the future they see (or at least an understanding over what parts they could or could not see - that ancient war probably involved both sides seeing and then trying to steer the future to their advantage).
Another character is at the 'above average reflexes' level, from a family of Chinese kung fu masters that are assisted by this magic, which might make the 'descendants of atlantis' theory less tenable (actually - he's the cousin of the magician, so atlantis could easily have been in ancient china....).
Nah, Atlantis was way, way, way back. Before humanity left Africa at all. Way before the Chinese got to China. Descendants of their mage-kings can be found in of pretty near all ethnic groups at this point (though the genes are massively watered down, further reducing available magical power), because they predate humanity's division into current ethnic groups.
See? Simple and straightforward.
Magic not spreading hugely through the gene pool is a huge problem. Easy way out is to say the genes also have a negative effect on fertility.
Hmmmm. Questionable utility. Even if magic reduces your fertility, you'll use it to aid your sister's family; increasing the odds of her children surviving and being successful, and thus increasing the fitness of genes very closely related to you.
It might be worthwhile to simply ignore this question entirely. Most readers won't ask it, and those few that do will note it down to suspension of disbelief. (The other strategy that can work is for the characters to ask the question, but be unable to find an answer, simply a consistent set of facts).
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (11 days later)
I'm thinking the ancient Atlantean mage-kings would have had all of the magical talents and none of the negative effects.
True, I can see there being a gene that makes you see the future and a gene that makes you more resistant to nose-bleeds, or gives you additional cognitive capacity to handle the stress of the prescience, or whatever - and you don't necessarily inherit them both together, or the two gene mutations don't happen at the same time.
Nah, Atlantis was way, way, way back. Before humanity left Africa at all.
Nice and has no annoying racial consequences (either the 'magical black person' trope, which with the whole chinese thing and martial arts is pretty problematic), plus puts it even further back. Maybe the population bottleneck had something to do with the Atlantis war - though Lake Toba is about as far from Africa as it's possible to get.
I kind of like the idea of the vampire weapons taking over following the war, whittling the humans down to the 30,000 range through over-hunting, realising that this is going to result in their demise, finally deciding to farm them more sustainably and then feral populations of humans result. You could even say the lake toba volcano was set off by someone in the service of vampires, in order to obscure the sun somewhat.
I can only imagine what a 70,000 YO vampire would be like though, if one survived to the present day to tell the tale of the ancient war. One character is about 5,000 YO and is considered to be at the very tippy top of vampire aged-ness (not the oldest, but top 5 or 10), another character is about 1,500 YO and and is somewhere in the world's top 100. Canon has rumours of vampires potentially being able to completely pass for human (down to sunlight and eating food instead of blood) after a certain period of time, but I'm not sure if those are just rumours or not.
Even if magic reduces your fertility, you'll use it to aid your sister's family; increasing the odds of her children surviving and being successful, and thus increasing the fitness of genes very closely related to you.
Not if the magic gene also reduces your fertility; if your sister has the magic gene, she's got reduced fertility. If she doesn't, she's just as fertile as anyone else but she's just as non-magical as anyone else, too, so you don't gain much.
I can imagine magic powers being a drawback if you're untrained or not expecting it; someone with random visions of the future might just think they get prophetic dreams, cassandra complex, etc.
I agree that we don't need to explain why after, say, 70,000 years the world isn't full of magical people, but it would be nice. We have idle dreams of publishing the stories and becoming fabulously wealthy on the proceeds, but that's probably not going to happen. I just like things to make sense in my own head.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (11 days later)
True, I can see there being a gene that makes you see the future and a gene that makes you more resistant to nose-bleeds, or gives you additional cognitive capacity to handle the stress of the prescience, or whatever - and you don't necessarily inherit them both together, or the two gene mutations don't happen at the same time.
Something like that, yes. (Though I imagine the future-seeing gene would have some limitations - even at full power, there are things it can see and things it can't - and the modern person with the gene doesn't know the limits).
Maybe the population bottleneck had something to do with the Atlantis war - though Lake Toba is about as far from Africa as it's possible to get.
Lake Toba wasn't the only population bottleneck in human history. Atlantis could have been responsible for an earlier one. Neanderthals might have been the Atlantean genetically-engineered slave caste...
I can only imagine what a 70,000 YO vampire would be like though, if one survived to the present day to tell the tale of the ancient war.
In seventy thousand years, he's almost certain to have been hit by a speck of sunlight at some point. (Unless perhaps he maintains the knowledge of the Atlantean mage-kings, and can use magic to protect himself, in which case he's really bad news - you'd have to cut off his head to prevent him re-casting the spell, then stake him through the heart and wait for the spell to wear off, then leave him out in the sun... and he's got way more experience in combat than you do...)
Canon has rumours of vampires potentially being able to completely pass for human (down to sunlight and eating food instead of blood) after a certain period of time, but I'm not sure if those are just rumours or not.
I think leave those as just rumours. If you want a vampire able to walk around in sunlight, it's not merely due to age... it's because he knows the defensive spells that will protect him.
Not if the magic gene also reduces your fertility; if your sister has the magic gene, she's got reduced fertility.
Ah, but she might not be expressing the gene - it might be carried, but inactive.
I can imagine magic powers being a drawback if you're untrained or not expecting it; someone with random visions of the future might just think they get prophetic dreams, cassandra complex, etc.
That could be a better reason why they're so rare - because they don't always give a fitness advantage.
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (13 days later)
Lake Toba wasn't the only population bottleneck in human history. Atlantis could have been responsible for an earlier one.
Good thought, but I always worry about anything that puts magic genes further in the past and thus having even more time to propagate. I suppose at the end of the day the exact timing doesn't matter, though I do like the imagery of humans being chattel that ultimately went feral. It kind of fits in thematically, too. In our universe, the world is pretty much a vegan society (in the background rather than a plot point, just like in Kung Fu Panda), so having humans in the position of farm animals kind of tickles me in that way.
In seventy thousand years, he's almost certain to have been hit by a speck of sunlight at some point.
Agreed. Unless he's a recluse in a cave somewhere. I'd imagine you'd get pretty fucking enlightened after 70,000 years. I'll put 'extant group of mage-kings looking after an ancient vampire' in my head though.
Question: do you think vampires need more, less or the same amount of blood as they age?
Ah, but she might not be expressing the gene - it might be carried, but inactive.
True. I think for magic to work, having it require a constellation of genes that play off each other constructively AND also have appropriate teaching (I can imagine a child with huge magic potential accidentally killing themselves or their parents/etc because they can't control it - like at the beginning of Frozen to an extent).
So a family with a good history of magic discipline would have worked out how to appropriately channel this: the kung fu masters who have slight prescience to predict an opponent in combat's next move probably teach their children from a young age how to move with it, trust their instincts, etc; if that same child was adopted by a family without a magical tradition might result in the child being anxious because s/he always has this weird feeling something's about to happen but can never be sure how to interpret it, or feel jumpy. I can imagine this would ultimately manifest in some quite debilitating anxiety symptoms - OCD or the like.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (13 days later)
Good thought, but I always worry about anything that puts magic genes further in the past and thus having even more time to propagate.
If it's far back enough to have propagated to different ethnicities, then it's already far enough back that it's propagated as far as it's going to propagate. Moving it further back doesn't change anything in that regard.
Agreed. Unless he's a recluse in a cave somewhere. I'd imagine you'd get pretty fucking enlightened after 70,000 years. I'll put 'extant group of mage-kings looking after an ancient vampire' in my head though.
Yeah, if it makes a good story, definitely put him in. But there's no necessity for him to be there unless you specifically want him.
Question: do you think vampires need more, less or the same amount of blood as they age?
Hmmm. I'm going to guess that they somehow gather some sort of energy (probably magical) from blood, which helps to sustain them. And perhaps powers some of their more supernatural abilities.
I'd guess that if the vampire's doing the same stuff, he'll need the same amount of blood. But will he be doing the same stuff? An older vampire might know lost Atlantean magic, which requires a certain amount of blood-energy to use; on the other hand, he would be able to better predict when and how to use his magic to best effect, getting the same result as a junior vampire but with less effort.
So the 70 000 year old vampire might use either more or less blood than a two-year-old vampire. But his physical age has nothing to do with it.
I think for magic to work, having it require a constellation of genes that play off each other constructively AND also have appropriate teaching
That looks like it would work well. Someone might be lucky enough to stumble onto training (and there might actually be genes for luck, I've seen that used very well before) but that would certainly limit the propagation a lot.
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (14 days later)
Thanks for all that, you've really helped me out! My roleplaying partner in particular is super into the idea of blank vampire heads. We like trying to differentiate our vampires from the mainstream and... yeah, it's just badass. I'm so excited to see how it shakes out.
I wonder if, for example, a vampire gets shot in the heart, and he heals himself up so he keeps his brain - do his zombie clones still grow? I assume they'd have to, the heart matter doesn't know it doesn't need to regenerate, otherwise starfish vampires wouldn't happen. So, could a vampire with some need for blank, easy-to-predict clones of itself create them? I suppose how useful are such clones, really? Maybe as a body double, but no-one will be fooled by that for long, but still, self-surgery, get a little bit of your heart out, put it in a secure cage, lock it, and let it grow in case you need it. Wow. I'm totally having a newly turned vampire find his mentor's double. That's creepy AF.
So! Invitations. That's another weakness vampires have. They need to be invited into buildings. It's related to the magic of a human sleeping - I guess the atlanteans wanted to avoid collateral damage when they made these weapons, so didn't want vampires to attack people in their homes?
- Vampires have to be invited into a residence. This is due to a type of magic ward that is formed by the mere fact of a human sleeping in it. The more regularly and soundly a human sleeps in the residence, the stronger the ward is. Same with an emotional connection.
- Invitations can be revoked; doing so gives the vampire an intense desire to leave the house/room. Depending on the strength of the human’s connection to the dwelling and the strength with which the invitation is revoked, the vampire might immediately walk out, or may have several minutes.
- An invitation must be freely given (so no hypnotising to get the invitation)
- Examples of different “strengths” of effect:
- A farmhouse that has been in the family for centuries will require a vampire receive a written invitation and that the vampire adhere to any terms on the invitation (e.g. “you are welcome at my house this evening from 7pm - 7:30pm”)
- A normal suburban home will require a normal, but clearly stated invitation. “come on in”
- A vampire with an invitation to enter a multi-person dwelling must get separate invitations to enter the bedrooms of each inhabitant, except for the one who invited her in to start with.
- A hotel room will not require an invitation to enter, but the human can ask the vampire to leave and that will be required. This only works if the human has slept in the room.
- Only humans are able to give permission, though it doesn’t matter if they are a ghoul, werewolf, witch, etc.
- A guest cannot give a vampire permission to enter a home unless they have been sleeping there for a solid month.
- A landlord cannot invite a vampire into her tenant’s house, because she does not sleep there.
- In other words, the legal owner of the house is irrelevant to the magic; in fact, if a vampire leaves his own house for a few weeks, and a human squats there, the vampire is no longer able to enter without permission.
- If a human has slept in a house for ten or more years, and later leaves, she retains some ability to give/revoke invitations.
Potential problems: what exactly counts as a house, among other things.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (14 days later)
The famed vampire hunter, Arminius Vambrey, is closing in on the well-known vampire, Dracula. He enters the target's castle during the day, when Dracula will be asleep. He keeps his crossbow, loaded with a wooden stake, at the ready and places mirrors as he goes to direct sunlight into the castle. Eventually, he finds a coffin. With care and a crowbar, he levers it open. The vampire inside stirs! He recognises the infamous Dracula at once. With a rapidly placed mirror, he redirects sunlight onto the creature. It crumbles to dust and ashes! He leaves, in the knowledge of a job well done.
That night, Dracula finds that his blank-headed decoy clone has been destroyed. He decided to quietly and quickly move someplace else and stay hidden for a decade or two.
Okay, so, invitations. It seems to me that this may not have been put in place by the vampire's original creators; it may rather be a limitation imposed by the same group who enchanted the Sun. But that's minor. There are more important questions.
What exactly counts as "freely given"? Can a vampire hold someone at gunpoint and obtain an invitation under duress? Can a vampire obtain an invitation under false pretenses ("why yes, small child, I am Santa Claus. May I come in so I can give you your presents?", "Police, sir. There have been noise complaints. May I come in?")? Can a vampire bypass the need for an invitation by killing the person who slept there (e.g. with a gun)?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (14 days later)
Can a vampire hold someone at gunpoint and obtain an invitation under duress?
Nope.
Can a vampire obtain an invitation under false pretenses?
Yes.
Can a vampire bypass the need for an invitation by killing the person who slept there (e.g. with a gun)?
Yes, provided they kill everyone who has slept there recently enough for the spell to have an effect. So, you could shoot Dad, but if Mum and the kids are out at the doctor's then the vampire can't enter the house without their permission, or, well, over their dead bodies.
I agree that with the vampires being created as weapons of war it logically follows without any trouble that the group creating the vampires would put a couple of limits, and when you're talking about war, prohibitions against entering a person's usual sleeping-place is a pretty good safeguard. I imagine the vampires came from human volunteers, who would have been screened for loyalty/etc, which also ensures they attack the enemy and don't go rogue (probably the mages have another killswitch for vampires in case they did, perhaps a spell lost to time)
u/CCC_037 [+3] (14 days later)
What happens if the vampire, with the aid of explosives or a bulldozer, demolishes the house to the point at which it is no longer a house?
I agree that with the vampires being created as weapons of war it logically follows without any trouble that the group creating the vampires would put a couple of limits
Oh dear. No. No, that does not follow at all. First of all, that assumes that the Atlantean concept of war vaguely matches the modern one (i.e. it is reserved for soldiers only). Historically, you'll find plenty of examples which show that the idea of leaving civilians out of any actual war is a pretty recent innovation - through a fair chunk of history, civilians on the losing side of war had a really bad time.
Secondly, it's only when someone is winning the war that they have the luxury of being able to take the time to finish the safety precautions; when they're losing, and it's a choice between releasing the dangerous superweapon now or facing annhilation tomorrow, what do you think they'd choose?
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (14 days later)
What happens if the vampire, with the aid of explosives or a bulldozer, demolishes the house to the point at which it is no longer a house?
Shit, that's a good thought. Really gets down into 'what is a house, anyway' territory. If you have people sleeping in a cave, is that a house for purposes of the invitation? If so, at which point is the 'threshold' past which the vampire needs an invitation.
I suppose 'house' in the context of this would be a structure created by humans that is currently used for sleeping.
On one hand I don't want vampires to be bulldozing houses to get to the creamy human inside; on the other hand, if a vampire is willing to bulldoze a house that he can't get an invitation into, that's already taking a huge, probably out-of-proportion risk so they are unlikely to be doing it routinely. So, yeah, a vampire could bulldoze a house to get past the invitation if necessary.
leaving civilians out of any actual war is a pretty recent innovation
You're right. Only need to think back to the old testament to realise how silly it is. So, why did the atlanteans add the 'invitation' quirk? It seems rather bizarre on the face of it. Was it something someone was developing for themselves that was quickly rejigged to be a more general war weapon, and they didn't have time to write out the invitation code anyway?
u/CCC_037 [+3] (14 days later)
Well, a vampire might demolish a house to get at the human inside if said human is a famed vampire hunter who's too close for comfort; that is, when there's a reward worth the risk.
I suppose 'house' in the context of this would be a structure created by humans that is currently used for sleeping.
Okay. Now, imagine Thomas. Thomas is a wilderness explorer, a hiker, a traveller. He sleeps under the stars every night in a different place, tucked into his reliable old sleeping bag.
His sleeping bag is a man-made structure, intended to be used for sleeping, in which he has slept every night for the last ten years. Does it double as surprisingly effective anti-vampire armour?
So, why did the atlanteans add the 'invitation' quirk?
Hmmmm. If they were being invaded, then presumably the invaders would not have slept in the local houses much (if at all), allowing them to drop vampires on their own cities with few if any casualties on their own side.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (14 days later)
a vampire might demolish a house to get at the human inside if said human is a famed vampire hunter who's too close for comfort; that is, when there's a reward worth the risk.
That IS a problem. The canonical vampire hunters live in a big house together and don't seem to do anything to keep it a secret. One of them is a skilled magic user who has set up 'wards', so I guess that handwaves it well enough. Or maybe I should disallow the bulldozer stategy; if a vampire is not allowed to interfere with a human's sleeping place, that's a big deal.
Does [Thomas' sleeping bag] double as surprisingly effective anti-vampire armour?
A vampire can't enter the sleeping bag, that much is obvious.
If a vampire can use a bulldozer to destroy a house with a human sleeping inside, can a vampire also use her super strength to destroy the house brick by brick?
I wonder if a sleeping bag fits more into the category of clothing (like pyjamas - it makes no sense for a vampire to be stopped by pyjamas), but then you can turn the sleeping bag into a tent and it's getting interesting - does the ward fail to establish, does it move with the tent, or is it made by the earth itself getting involved in the magic somehow? Like, is the system causing the magic ground>structure>human, or just structure>human?
I feel like I err on the side of ground>structure>human system causing the magic. I kind of like putting a precedent for the ground being involved in the magic of everything, since I like the idea of vampires not being able to cross running water as well (though.... ground water basically kills this concept).
Other fun fact: some particularly old vampires can change into bats. Well, in my headcanon they're not bat bats, they're just small, furry, winged creatures that look enough like bats that it seems like a sensible name for them. I think that's less weird than them being able to turn into an actual species of flying mammal.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (14 days later)
Hmmm. Depending on how 'wards' work - could they make it do that a vampire is unable to know anything about the house?
Alternatively, the surrounding area could have been deliberately designed to prevent bulldozers - perhaps by the aid of a ditch, or buried explosives...
If a vampire can use a bulldozer to destroy a house with a human sleeping inside, can a vampire also use her super strength to destroy the house brick by brick?
Hmmm. Well, he can't put his fingers into the wall to get a grip. He might be able to punch the wall enough to make a hole, or do serious damage with the aid of a crowbar...
Like, is the system causing the magic ground>structure>human, or just structure>human?
There's also then the question of caravans and houseboats to consider. I think at this point I need to ask; what is the fundamental basis of magic in your world? Is it structured along classic-elemental lines, or something else?
I like the idea of vampires not being able to cross running water as well (though.... ground water basically kills this concept).
There may be ways around the groundwater problem, but we need to first consider the above question...
Well, in my headcanon they're not bat bats, they're just small, furry, winged creatures that look enough like bats that it seems like a sensible name for them.
Important question; when in this shape, are they able to echolocate?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (14 days later)
I think at this point I need to ask; what is the fundamental basis of magic in your world? Is it structured along classic-elemental lines, or something else?
The magic system is very unexplored, especially vis-a-vis the actual mechanics; not sure how much of that is because it's unexplored or how much of that is just in my RP partner's headcanon (I don't have any magic using characters). The witch has a staff, which she casts spells using and stores spells in, but beyond that I can't really say. Here's what we've got written in the canon document:
- Magic is something that is genetically inborn, and somewhat rare. There are mild psychics, people with good luck, etc, who make up the bulk of people containing the magic genes. People who can actually learn and wield magic successfully are in the top 10%.
- Magic is also different depending on genetic skill, and who it is learned from. As a result, no two magic users will cast spells the same way.
- People can learn magic from demons, from friendly spirits, passed down through the family, be self taught, from the Earth, certain churches, and from certain animals.
- Some people who show magic abilities (such as Kung Fu Family or Prescient Guy With Nosebleeds) could probably be better with it, but aren’t as they have not had real teachers and have had to rely on natural ability.
- Magic can develop in people who have no genetic predisposition through possession.
could they make it do that a vampire is unable to know anything about the house?
Don't see why not, it seems like the most logical way for them to do it - have people not know the house is there, but not find it weird that they don't know a house is there. Would be a bother for receiving mail but that's why god invented PO boxes.
when in [bat-like] shape, are they able to echolocate?
I'd say not. They'd have eyes which are of acceptable quality for seeing stuff they need to see to be able to fly and whatnot.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (14 days later)
There are demons and spirits?
Hmmmm. What's known about them?
How widespread is magic use among animals?
Once someone has been possessed (and thus gained magic), does he retain access to magic if the possession is exercised? (Assume he has zero genetic disposition pre-possession) Does anyone possessed by the same spirit gain the same magical abilities?
On the house - it could just make the house supernaturally uninteresting. Yes, there's a house there, but it's so incredibly mundane that any hunters are surely elsewhere...
On transforming vampires; according to legend, vampires could also transform into wolves. Do your vampires have this ability as well?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (14 days later)
How widespread is magic use among animals?
Can't help here, really sorry. That was my partner's addition and I have no head-canon for it. I'll ask her.
Once someone has been possessed (and thus gained magic), does he retain access to magic if the possession is exercised? (Assume he has zero genetic disposition pre-possession) Does anyone possessed by the same spirit gain the same magical abilities?
Again, not really sure; I'd imagine the magic skillz are specific to the spirit doing the posession, the human body is just a vessel (I believe you can be posessed by a spirit and not be aware of it, though - but that's all part of a plot line that was never explored and abandoned).
On the house - it could just make the house supernaturally uninteresting. Yes, there's a house there, but it's so incredibly mundane that any hunters are surely elsewhere...
Basically, a Somebody Else's Problem Field? Love it!
Do your vampires have the ability to become wolves as well?
I don't think so; we have werewolves so that niche is filled.
There are demons and spirits? Hmmmm. What's known about them?
Spirits have very little explanation; demons are reasonably well fleshed out and my god are they complicated. Short form: basically every folklore demon, creature, cryptid etc exists in an underground world (or plane-shifted world; one demon character says it's under the surface of the moon, though in-universe it's mentioned he's wrong because of the gravity not being different). It can be teleported between by using teleportation booths. There are thousands of 'pure' demon species (e.g. centaurs, gargoyles, sirens, kelpies), and they generally live in this 'underground' world in their own version of society.
They can interbreed with each other, though it's rare (on par with getting pregnant from precum). If e.g. a centaur and a gargoyle have a baby, the baby is mostly human in appearance with maybe a horse tail and funky teeth and some claws. This is because the human state is considered to be the "base", "impure" state of all living things, and the individual demon bloodlines are "perfect", and this perfection fades away with interbreeding. A lot of mostly-human creatures from folklore are actually these half-breeds. Legend has it that humans were created when half breeds kept on interbreeding until the supernatural essence was almost lost. Regardless, demons and half breeds can breed with humans, which is where a lot of the 'magic genes' originated. (Two of the major characters are a half-breed and his dad, which is why there's so much detail here)
Demons ignore humans for the most part, though many keep them as pets, eat them, and the like - generally they're from stock that stays on the demon plane rather than from kidnapping from 'our world'. That said, many demons take humans who are in abusive homes on as pets, improving their lot. Still others fall in love with humans and keep them as "pets" because it's not socially acceptable to be in a relationship with a human. Still others have human "pets" and the humans are into it as a BDSM thing.
Racism against humans and half breeds runs deep in the demon world, too. Humans are literally seen as on par with animals, and half-breeds are not considered all that much better (though half-breeds have all the rights a full demon has).
Also, demons have the sorts of powers you'd expect: a gorgon will turn you into stone, for example, and a dragon can breathe fire.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (14 days later)
Can't help here, really sorry. That was my partner's addition and I have no head-canon for it. I'll ask her.
Hmmmm. Given that your demons are already covering all the cryptid niches, I'm going to guess "not too common". And what that means is that the Atlanteans didn't just tame magic; they pretty much created it from whole cloth. (If it had been around all along, a lot of animals would use it)
Again, not really sure; I'd imagine the magic skillz are specific to the spirit doing the posession, the human body is just a vessel
If the posessing spirit can access and delete its host's memories, then it can definitely go unnoticed.
Now I'm thinking of a cult in tentative control of a spirit. New initiates are possessed by the spirit at a certain point, giving them access to a small set of magical abilities, which are left behind when the spirit leaves; perhaps to do with direct mental manipulation, mind control, memory alteration, that sort of thing. (If you're wondering how they maintain control of the spirit, note that this is a spirit that specialises in mind control - they think they have it imprisoned, but it thinks it is slowly building up an army of slaves for its own use...)
Basically, a Somebody Else's Problem Field? Love it!
Basically, yes. And who says mind control is only for villain use?
I don't think so; we have werewolves so that niche is filled.
Okie dokie lokie.
Demons
Fascinating. So there's an entire alternate world out there.
Right. Let's first consider these teleportation booths. Assume I step in a booth in the Shadow World, and step out of a booth here. Now I move this booth one kilometre to the north, and go back to the Shadow World. Do I go back to the same place, or do I turn up north of where I last was in the Shadow World?
The fact that the demons have easy access to magic has a lot of implications for Atlantean society; first of all, it implies massive self-modification among the Atlantean ruling class.
Could the Shadow World be the far future (or past) of this world?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (15 days later)
And what that means is that the Atlanteans didn't just tame magic; they pretty much created it from whole cloth.
Possibly, though mentioning demons made me think that perhaps the magic was introduced by demons, or was what created demons. I'm not sure how that could happen in a pre-technological society though.
Now I'm thinking of a cult in tentative control of a spirit.
Awesome. Actually, maybe spirits are what created the magical atlantis civilisation, started the war, and created demons with their magic. Of course then the question is "where do spirits come from", which is just moving the goal posts of the above a bit further back, so maybe not.
Do I go back to the same place, or do I turn up north of where I last was in the Shadow World?
The booths correspond with their 'partner' like a Stargate; so each Earth booth has a corresponding Underground booth, so moving the booths makes the entrances/exits (they're two way) work.
Setting up a booth isn't trivial, by the way, though I'm not sure exactly how it's done. I assume most booths are bought and sold as-is rather than created anew. A city of 2 million has about 10 or 20 booths in it, say.
A character has a booth hidden in an ordinary-looking Earth shop which he charges a toll to enter. I'd say in terms of luxury, having one would be on par with having a sailboat; possible for some but most people couldn't hope to afford one unless they made it a personal priority.
Could the Shadow World be the far future (or past) of this world?
It could be. The Shadow World (Demon World or Underground as we refer to it) is definitely smaller in size than Earth, because the 'wild' humans who one meets there are from a diverse set of countries and cultures. But maybe the Shadow World is as large as Earth and most of the portals simply go to the megacity / NYC equivalent of that world, and out in the sticks there are cliffs where Sirens and Harpies catch fish or something.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (17 days later)
I'm not sure how that could happen in a pre-technological society though.
Atlantis? Pre-technological? No. Atlantis had all the technology. Atlantis considered fusion power merely a single small step above fire, and one thy had passed beyond so long ago that no-one used it for anything anymore.
Arthur C. Clarke famously remarked that sufficiently powerful technology is indistinguishable from magic. The Atlanteans had passed that point centuries ago. At the height of Atlantis, they had it all. Their empire spread through millions upon billions upon trillions of shadow worlds, and the shadow they cast on those worlds was vast indeed. Nothing and no-one could hope to stand up to the technomagical might of Atlantis.
And then the civil war came. Vast and powerful were the weapons wielded in that war - the self-replicating killer now known as a vampire was the minor weapon of a minor terrorist faction, brushed aside and ignored by the more powerful families. Families of medium power waged their wars in the past, sending back history eraser bombs the remove their greatest foes from the pages of history itself; the most powerful families, protected in arcane and powerful ways from such devices, used even more esoteric weapons (fictionalization bombs, defictionalisation bombs, and weirder fare).
What worlds shook and shattered under the might of their war we will never know; what we do know is that, of the trillions of worlds Atlantis had stretched over, there are but two still accessible; one of which contains many demons, descendants of the ancient Atlantean families who changes and twisted their own genes in their eternal search for perfection (and self-sustaining magical technology implants were always popular) and the other, which was probably a nature park or someone's back garden or something, ended up with a bunch of original-genome humans and virtually no demons. It's quite probable that the only reason these two worlds escaped the War largely unscathed was because no-one thought they were important enough to bother with.
Awesome. Actually, maybe spirits are what created the magical atlantis civilisation, started the war, and created demons with their magic. Of course then the question is "where do spirits come from", which is just moving the goal posts of the above a bit further back, so maybe not.
I'm thinking that spirits are kind of like user interfaces for particularly complex bits of magical "code". Think Microsoft's Clippy, but less annoying, actually helpful, and displaying genuine intelligence. (If you have the necessary user authorisation, you can order them to do anything, but virtually no-one does anymore...)
The booths correspond with their 'partner' like a Stargate; so each Earth booth has a corresponding Underground booth, so moving the booths makes the entrances/exits (they're two way) work.
Okay... so, by correctly arranging the journey, you can get from North America to New Zealand by foot in an hour or so if you're willing to pay the necessary tolls?
Useful, and I can imagine your character wth the shop to point out this advantage to people (in order to collect more toll money from tourists and smugglers). If the local police want to know why your passport's not in order, you're on your own, but you dodge all the border guards.
But maybe the Shadow World is as large as Earth and most of the portals simply go to the megacity / NYC equivalent of that world, and out in the sticks there are cliffs where Sirens and Harpies catch fish or something.
That works. Besides, you get some really big cryptids (the Kraken comes to mind) and the Shadow World needs space for them.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (18 days later)
Your description of Atlantis is so beautiful I want to start writing about it! I also like how Atlantis is no longer canonically in our timeline.
and self-sustaining magical technology implants were always popular
I assume they're also self-propagating, with the demons themselves having no knowledge of their own origins?
There are also gods who exist and are worshiped by demons, but they are more in the vein of pantheon gods - different demons worship different gods, some of the gods are race exclusive, and they don't have anything like omniscience or omnipotence, so they can quite easily slot in as the 'upper middle class' to the demons' middle-class - just much more powerful spell-casters, maybe even remnants of the original atlantis.
[spirits as clippy]
Yes, and the malevolent-seeming manifestations are just a side-effect of not knowing how to properly interface with them. I can also see exorcism as the magical equivilent of presssing ctrl+alt+del and ending the processes.
so, by correctly arranging the journey, you can get from North America to New Zealand by foot in an hour or so if you're willing to pay the necessary tolls?
Absolutely. This has a problem though, you could break the light speed limit, and thus time travel, couldn't you? But light travels so fast maybe it doesn't matter. Let's work it out:
circumference of the earth = 40,000km => about 20,000 km between places at worst Time light takes to travel 20,000km is 67 millisecondsSo giving each portal an almost-imperceptible half-second delay means that we don't have time travel. Not sure whether the demon world is literally a parallel universe or if it's underground, but if it's a parallel universe physics can just kind of shrug at that and if it's underground then the laws of physics are still not getting broken.
and I can imagine your character wth the shop to point out this advantage to people
This would require giving knowledge of the underground world to normies, which must be taboo or it would have happened long ago; but I assume that demon folk use them routinely for international or even interstate travel. (Actually, given humans have no rights in the underground world, enterprising drug kingpins might find themselves on a centaur's dinner table if they don't have a backstory, or if they encounter an unsavory type).
Besides, you get some really big cryptids (the Kraken comes to mind) and the Shadow World needs space for them.
I'm just imagining a big, misunderstood Kraken squeezing into a river in the Shadow World to give everyone hugs with its tentacles, and everyone is happy to let it, because they know that a Kraken is all about hugs.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (18 days later)
Your description of Atlantis is so beautiful I want to start writing about it!
Thanks!
I also like how Atlantis is no longer canonically in our timeline.
Yeah, that avoids all sorts of tricky questions about historical records and stuff.
I assume they're also self-propagating, with the demons themselves having no knowledge of their own origins?
Definitely. No Atlantean merchant would ever fit something as stupid as planned obsolescence into something they sell to one of the powerful Atlantean families. (The ability to wipe people from time if they are rude to you encourages an amazing amount of politeness.)
There are also gods who exist and are worshiped by demons ... they can quite easily slot in as the 'upper middle class' to the demons' middle-class - just much more powerful spell-casters, maybe even remnants of the original atlantis.
Yeah, that works. Some of the demons may have been servants as well - I can see dryads as gardeners, naiads as water-based landscapers, and so on.
Yes, and the malevolent-seeming manifestations are just a side-effect of not knowing how to properly interface with them. I can also see exorcism as the magical equivilent of presssing ctrl+alt+del and ending the processes.
"Fits? No, no, no, that one's supposed to make you dance in perfect choreography. You did spend ten minutes meditating over your desired dance routine before letting it possess you, right? What, you didn't? Well, then, what did you expect it to do?"
So giving each portal an almost-imperceptible half-second delay means that we don't have time travel.
As long as you're only exiting them on Planet Earth, yes. (I can easily see one guy with a portal that comes out somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy - if there's a half-second delay on that, then yes, in theory you can use it to mess about with time travel; but it would be virtually impossible for you to actually do anything with it and still end up within a dozen years of your starting point (so kind of a one-way trip).
This would require giving knowledge of the underground world to normies
Not necessarily. He could just point it out to people who already know about the portal. ("Hey, I'm told there are people in New Zealand who will pay quite a bit for cigarettes that haven't paid import taxes. Incidentally, I sell cigarettes over there as well. Would you like to buy - no? Your loss.")
I'm just imagining a big, misunderstood Kraken squeezing into a river in the Shadow World to give everyone hugs with its tentacles, and everyone is happy to let it, because they know that a Kraken is all about hugs.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (20 days later)
Adromeda Galaxy Portals
Hmmmmm - I assume to create a portal, you'd need to do some sort of ritual or spell in each "plane", so good luck making it in any place that you can't reach in your lifetime.
Though that said, it would be just as easy to say the portals have a finite range of, oh, a couple of light-seconds, and parallel universes don't add to that.
Supernaturals using the black market to sell things internationally
Yep, that's probably a good way for the supernaturals to make money.
Actually - how would an immortal being make money, really? I just take it as given that immortals have effectively infinite income, but it won't be as simple as opening a bank account 300 years ago and collecting interest because, well, it's kind of pesky to "die" and will it to yourself every fifty years or so. You hear a lot about them doing things like selling antiques, old books and the like, but would a vampire really want to keep a huge stockpile of random crap like a hoarder in the hope it becomes valuable some day? They probably have a very different perception of time, so maybe it's like stockpiling all your high-end soap during the year and then selling it around Mother's Day to maximise your profits, but they don't know whether people are buying their mum soap this year or whether they'd rather buy her a day spa voucher or brunch, and then all of a sudden you end up with 400 different things you need to stockpile.
I guess vampires, having the ability to mind control people, can simply steal money, embezzle donations, and all that fun stuff. But say an immortal with no powers beyond immortality - what would be the optimal thing to do?
u/CCC_037 [+2] (20 days later)
Hmmmmm - I assume to create a portal, you'd need to do some sort of ritual or spell in each "plane", so good luck making it in any place that you can't reach in your lifetime.
So the owner of such a portal, if it existed, would have to have been an original Atlantean.
Though that said, it would be just as easy to say the portals have a finite range of, oh, a couple of light-seconds, and parallel universes don't add to that.
Make it a few light-minutes and you can have portals to Mars.
Actually - how would an immortal being make money, really?
Hmmmm. Well, immortality doesn't seem that easy to directly monetise. Unless you're doing the whole Harry Houdini type thing - dump the immortal, tied up, with weights on his feet, into a giant tub of water and watch as he miraculously survives what can't kill him!
So. An immortal can basically make money in one of two ways. Either by developing some skill (world's best chess player? He certainly has the time to learn) or selling some antique (hmmm... time to clean out the attic again...)
Both have downsides, The skill might become obsolete, either because no-one's interested anymore (watch the Human Calculator multiply two three-digit numbers in his head!) or because it's just generally useless (dodo breeder). The antique is no more likely to be valuable than the contents of your grandmother's attic (sure, there might be something there, but unless deliberate effort is made...) Worse, forms of wealth can change from time to time; what's worth a lot now can be worthless in fifty years' time. (A successful immortal, than, needs to change, and change often, to avoid simply becomig that grumpy old guy telling octogenerians to get off his lawn).
Another thought struck me recently. This alternate world; does it have a sun? And is that sun Sol? If not, then it strikes me that a 70 000 year old vampire could easily have survived to that age by simply staying hidden in the alternate world, where sunlight can't touch him...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (20 days later)
So the owner of such a portal, if it existed, would have to have been an original Atlantean.
Yeah, I'd say the original portals between worlds were created by Atlanteans, but they've been imitated since.
Either by developing some skill (world's best chess player? He certainly has the time to learn)
Problem with that is kind of like in The Man from Earth - sure, you become an expert botanist, but only to the extent that botany was understood in 1674 when you got your phD, and, well, we've discovered evolution now, not to mention genetics. Pretty much every skill becomes useless very quickly, unless you're constantly learning, and, well, that's too much like work.
The antique is no more likely to be valuable than the contents of your grandmother's attic
This is exactly where I got. Those antiques roadshow antiques go for a few grand, and that's, say, a month's salary at most, and that's for the good ones. Then you have the problem of if you have an artifact from the year 800, it's going to be hard to find a private buyer for it and a museum can't afford it, and you're not going to know Van Gogh is a guy to buy your paintings from. It's just a terrible strategy unless you're going to put a lot of effort into understanding trends.
Then again, now I'm thinking the dutch tulip inflation was the result of vampire mind control.
This alternate world; does it have a sun? And is that sun Sol?
Well... that question made me think: if vampires were created on Atlantis, why are they vulnerable to Sol, of all things? Maybe a small offshoot of Atlanteans ran to Earth, scared and alone, and enchanted Sol to protect them from vampires, the hitherto almost unstoppable force. Probably this resulted in them mostly being exterminated by non-vampire members of the enemy faction, leaving the world today?
To answer your question: canonically, everything that has occurred in the alternate world has happened underground. It could still easily simply be a huge cavern on earth. I'm now imagining something like The Matrix, where nuclear winter or similar has rendered the surface uninhabitable so all the residents have gone underground.
Regardless, everything being underground in one city that's easily accessible from Earth means that a vampire could easily live there. I'm wondering whether vampires just don't tend to live down there, though - they're kind of like humans, and there's all that fantasy racism happening - but then again, vampires are damn powerful, much more intelligent than humans, have a very good reason to live underground, and presumably can kick a centaur's arse if it comes to it.
Perhaps the underground realm has an anti-vampire measure that's more powerful than the sun? And our world and the underground realm are the only two places that are not knee-deep in vampires?
u/CCC_037 [+2] (20 days later)
sure, you become an expert botanist, but only to the extent that botany was understood in 1674 when you got your phD
Which means that, not only do you have to keep learning stuff, you also have to keep unlearning stuff. You have to learn about continental drift and unlearn that the continents are static and eternal; so on and so forth. (And a lot of scientific paradigm shifts happened not because people came to accept the new theory, but rather because the adherents of the old theory all died with time...)
So it would either have to be something that's an inherently limited field (like chess - no-one's going to suddenly "discover" that a King can move like a knight) or something that retains its usefulness even in the face of new discoveries (writing novels, picking pockets, stage magicianship, Atlantean magic).
[on the value of antiques]
Of course, it's possible for the immortal to turn this around - to take an antique and make it valuable. A sufficiently cunning immortal may recognise the potential of (say) Superman comics early enough to buy a #1 (may even have had a hand in making it so popular, somehow) and then gone on a careful, long-term plan to eliminate most other copies.
Or he may get a job in a post office and, with care, obtain a never-officially-printed sheet of some stamp he expects to become extremely rare and valuable later (perhaps because he deliberately damaged the print after a few runs?)
if vampires were created on Atlantis, why are they vulnerable to Sol, of all things?
An excellent question. At some point, some one must have enchanted Sol for some reason. Maybe a minor Atlantean family, wanting a vampire-free back garden? Maybe thousands of suns in thousands of worlds were enchanted?
Regardless, everything being underground in one city that's easily accessible from Earth means that a vampire could easily live there. I'm wondering whether vampires just don't tend to live down there, though - they're kind of like humans, and there's all that fantasy racism happening - but then again, vampires are damn powerful, much more intelligent than humans, have a very good reason to live underground, and presumably can kick a centaur's arse if it comes to it.
Not to mention which, with that whole fantasy racism thing going on, they can probably just stroll down to the market and buy a human when they get thirsty.
The first thing I can think of, is that there is a really ancient vampire there, who feels he's got a really good life, and he's not inclined to welcome any more. (He knows how to kill them, too; stake 'em and send 'em back through the portal. The other end of his Death Portal is in low Earth orbit, that'll kill just about anything... and that's before considering that he might very well be old enough to know Atlantean magic first-hand)
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (21 days later)
[on the value of expertise]
Yeah, the main vampire basically get obsessed with a pursuit for a hundred years or so and then moves onto a new obsession once he's had enough. Warfare, botany, architecture, cooking (with superhuman scent you don't need to taste your food), and so on. I'd imagine it would be quite disheartening to find decades of work superseded repeatedly, so one wouldn't put too much stock into expertise.
Growing a garden, or, ever since the days of mendel, breeding a line of animals that pleases you is far more rewarding. That russian guy and his foxes? I've heard of a great vampire who has bred a species of miniature giraffe for his menagerie.
And, well, those expensive cats - not the ones that are some tiny part serval, the ones you've heard about only the wealthiest having, the ones that they say are just more serval than their peers, but they look a lot more like leopards than servals? Let's just say that a vampire with a breeding project of her own was running a bit short of money and realised that rich people will buy anything.
[vampires making shit valuable]
YES. Especially on stamps. "Oh? Misprinted stamps are valuable? Guess I'm becoming a stamp-printer's apprentice, a poor one at that, and then my 'great-great nephew' is going to find a trove of stamps in
myhis attic."I'm also imagining modern vampires getting the first printings of everything they can get their hands on. Some might be good calls - like pokemon cards. Others, not so much.
They're really going to turn out to be hoarders, aren't they?
Speculation: many hoarders are merely vampire's ghouls or jannisaries who have been convinced to keep everything because their vampire master might need it some day. That way vampires get to keep a bunch of crap, and not have to worry about storing it themselves.
there is a really ancient vampire there, who feels he's got a really good life, and he's not inclined to welcome any more.
So.... you're talking about the God of the vampires? He lives in the part of town inhabited by many of the other gods, you see. Powerful enough to be on the level of any one of them. Not that many vampires worship him - some don't view him as a god so much as a boogeyman - but unlike most other gods he doesn't have big ceremonies where his worshippers gather. No. Each worshipper has one day every century or so where they can visit the god (bringing an appropriate gift, and you know how vampires are with gifts! No fewer than three jannisaries will do along with the usual works of art, rare animals, interestingly shaped gords and the rest of it - unsurprisingly this Vampire God has a herd of quagga that he obtained from his various gifts).
Of course, the vampire god's central tenant is that vampires are not allowed to settle underground. He's probably got some doctrine, like they need to be near the natural humans, the constant threat of the sun is character building, whatever. But he's the only one who lives there, and if someone spends more than a couple of days, well, there's a reason some vampires think of him as a sort of bogeyman. Many of his worshippers just give the tribute because they think it will endear them to him.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (22 days later)
I'd imagine it would be quite disheartening to find decades of work superseded repeatedly, so one wouldn't put too much stock into expertise.
You just gotta put it in the right expertise. You can't make lying obsolete. Or storytelling.
[vampires breeding animals]
That makes a lot of sense, Some of them probably breed humans, too. (I presume making them jannissaries doesn't mess with their genetics).
Probably breed them for obedience, among other stuff.
[vampires being hoarders]
Now I'm imagining this super-powerful Shadow World vampire, panicing because some vampire hunters are on his trail - not because they present any sort of actual threat to him, but because they are going to absolutely ruin his collection of first-edition Pokemon cards!
unsurprisingly this Vampire God has a herd of quagga that he obtained from his various gifts
Maybe he doesn't. Maybe the quagga breeding project was started by some minor vampire looking for an appropriate gift...
u/MagicWeasel [+3] Cheela Astronaut (24 days later)
You can't make lying obsolete. Or storytelling.
I don't know about that so much. There's a lot of mores about stories; for example, when we were learning about Hamlet we were taught that because of the moral attitudes of the time, any characters who committed a sin above a certain level would have to die by the end of the play, which is why it is such a famously bloody tale. That said, Hamlet still affected me a lot when I read it such that when I'm feeling down I like to read the "Too Too Solid Flesh" soliloquy, so maybe it is a bit more universal that I give it credit for.
Then again, a vampire writing literature for humans (or singing a ballad, etc) would probably result in a bit of a "generation gap" issue - I'm thinking of when big brands try to use memes on twitter and end up being cringeworthy, or the time my grandfather tried to write a young adult book series in one of his many get rich quick schemes.
It requires a lot of immersion in the culture to be successful, and when you're a vampire are you likely to keep yourself deeply immersed in human culture? Are you likely to know that people were worried about mutually assured destruction 50 years ago, and now everyone's worried about global warming? I'm imagining a vampire putting an anti-semetic novel into circulation because he was vaguely aware that humans are not fond of that one race of people right now, not realising he's behind the times.
Better to make this generation's JK Rowling or Walt Disney your ghoul, then there's no need to worry about actually writing for humans. You can write for vampires instead.
[breeding humans]
Yeah, I'm wondering what the Underground bloodline of humans would be like. I'm imagining calm. I'm also wondering if they'd know language - foxP2 or whatever need not be conserved, after all, as they're being artificially selected. And you might end up with a situation like Genie, where the baby humans don't learn a language and never can. So I guess the Underground humans wouldn't have any sort of language, though they'd still be just as intelligent, and if you kidnapped a baby you'd probably be able to teach it.
Demons have their own language, with a spectacularly complicated writing system, and just hearing or seeing the language can give humans headaches or vertigo, so I don't imagine that livestock level humans would be picking that up.
quagga breeding project for an appropriate gift
I can see it now: he did something to offend one of the more major vampires in his region, and it was a really serious gaffe (more serious even than drinking from the cups in the wrong order during a formal blood service!). Traditionally, the appropriate gift are three female quagga within a certain age range, who are the daughters of three sisters who each was bred with a different nephew of theirs. Of course, in the interest of practicality and much like with many bygone species from before, vampires have started giving and receiving zebras instead. However, the offended vampire is so old, and so traditional that the minor vampire doesn't want to take chances; and, hey, perhaps instead of merely being an appropriate gift, the elder will consider it an extravagant gift, and his reciprocation may include a particularly desirable little swath of territory...
u/CCC_037 [+2] (24 days later)
Better to make this generation's JK Rowling or Walt Disney your ghoul, then there's no need to worry about actually writing for humans.
Oh, I didn't mean story writing. I meant story telling. Standing up in front of an audience, reading their reactions, tailoring the story towards what keeps their attention... and by setting it in a time the vampire is more familiar with, he can avoid a lot or cultural problems...
You're right about story writing. There are universal aspects to it, but a vampire would be tripped up by the more modern stylistic elements; elements that are much harder to notice in a spoken performance, especially when the vampire is able to read the audience and tailor the tale to match their expectations and reactions.
(Even in a written work, a good editor will be able to deal with most of the problems - if a vampire could swallow his pride enough to listen to one).
Also, I've just realised - there's only one J.K. Rowling. How many vampires would want to collect her as a ghoul?
How would they decide who gets her?
Yeah, I'm wondering what the Underground bloodline of humans would be like.
I'm thinking they'd be bred for quantity of blood, flavour, obedience and loyalty. So they'd probably be of ruddy complexion, perhaps tending towards slightly plump, and act slightly like well-fed cattle.
I can see it now: he did something to offend one of the more major vampires in his region, and it was a really serious gaffe...
Heh, yes, I can certainly imagine that. Maybe he ghouled the wrong best-selling novelist?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (24 days later)
there's only one J.K. Rowling. How would they decide who gets her?
HAHAHA. I love this. Vampires care a lot about physical territory, so the vampire who owns the territory her mansion is in would have the obvious claim; however, if she does a speaking tour in your city, you'd do well to grab her, ghoul her to yourself, and then have her announce she's fallen in love with your quaint town and move there permanently. Rinse and repeat.
Are there any celebrities, past or present, who were known for being nomads?
More realistically I'd imagine usurping someone else's ghoul would result in retribution unless you were much stronger than them yourself. So the strongest vampires would have Bill Gates as a ghoul (hey, maybe all his charity work is just a smokescreen to hide the comparatively modest millions being siphoned into a vampire's shell corporation?), and your average well-to-do vampire would just have a local millionaire or two. After all, no need to get greedy, stick your neck out, and risk people coming after you, hey?
they'd be bred for quantity of blood, flavour, obedience and loyalty. So they'd probably be of ruddy complexion, perhaps tending towards slightly plump, and act slightly like well-fed cattle.
Yes. With very high blood pressure and lots of cholesterol no doubt. They'd probably keep them well hydrated too, to keep that pressure up.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (24 days later)
the vampire who owns the territory her mansion is in would have the obvious claim
Suddenly, territories likely to produce top-flight novelists are looking a lot more valuable.
Are there any celebrities, past or present, who were known for being nomads?
No, no, no, don't look for the ones known for being nomads. Look for the ones who never left their home town...
More realistically I'd imagine usurping someone else's ghoul would result in retribution unless you were much stronger than them yourself.
So it's possible to usurp a ghoul, then? One vampire ghouling someone doesn't immunise him against everyone else?
After all, no need to get greedy, stick your neck out, and risk people coming after you, hey?
You don't even need a local millionaire. You just need a local banker. (Hey, no skin off your nose if he is arrested for embezzlement, right? And then mysteriously dies in prison, after transferring a lot of money to an untraceable Swiss bank account...)
Yes. With very high blood pressure and lots of cholesterol no doubt. They'd probably keep them well hydrated too, to keep that pressure up.
...depends whether cholesterol tastes good or not. Other than that, yes, that's probably right.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (25 days later)
Suddenly, territories likely to produce top-flight novelists are looking a lot more valuable
Or bankers, or actors, or, well, anyone succesful really. I wonder if any vampires are conducting human breeding projects? Are the Rothschilds just a family of vampire ghouls?
So it's possible to usurp a ghoul, then? One vampire ghouling someone doesn't immunise him against everyone else?
I've actually never thought about it too closely. Even if you can't ghoul a ghoul, you can wait a week for the ghoul to become unghouled and then ghoul the ghoul. But can you ghoul an ex-ghoul of someone else, or must the ghouls you ghoul be previously your ghouls or never ghouled?
I kind of like the idea of a ghoul not being able to be ghouled by another vampire, even after the ghouling wears off; it keeps vampires from making moves on one another's ghouls, and as the connection is almost vaguely romantic it makes sense as something that would include some "loyalty". I do know that trying to take someone else's jannisary is considered VERY rude.
You don't even need a local millionaire. You just need a local banker.
Indeed. That's probably the way of these things; a vampire gets money, gold bullion, etc and when they run low they just ghoul one of the local humans and get a source.
Thought: bitcoin makes getting untraceable money much easier. Satoshi is probably a vampire, or at the very least a ghoul. After all, for all the privacy advantages bitcoin as for us humans, it is FAR more useful for a vampire.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (25 days later)
Or bankers, or actors, or, well, anyone succesful really.
Cities, then.
I wonder if any vampires are conducting human breeding projects?
You mean outside of the Underground? Quite possibly, I imagine.
But can you ghoul an ex-ghoul of someone else, or must the ghouls you ghoul be previously your ghouls or never ghouled?
This has some other interesting side-effects, as well. Imagine a minor vampire ghouling (say) J.K. Rowling. Now, all the major vampires who want to can't, not even if they kill the minor vampire. The only way to control her is to keep the minor vampire alive, and control him (probably through threats and/or intimidation). (I'm imagining a minor vampire sitting very still with an extremely nervous grin while two or three major vampires all glare at each other...)
Also, it means that you can send even high-value ghoul into another vampire's territory (say, carrying a valuable gift) without any risk of the ghoul being stolen. Freed, maybe, but not stolen.
Thought: bitcoin makes getting untraceable money much easier. Satoshi is probably a vampire, or at the very least a ghoul. After all, for all the privacy advantages bitcoin as for us humans, it is FAR more useful for a vampire.
...huh. That's reasonable.
I'm not sure a vampire needs untraceable money, though. He can just use his ghoul's credit card - perfectly traceable, it just doesn't trace back to him.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (25 days later)
Oh, on the subject of ghouls - did I mention that ghouls stop ageing until they stop drinking blood? I probably, did, right? Makes perfect sense though it can mean your ghoul might need to be... weaned, lest it stops aging and loses its cover.
Imagine a minor vampire ghouling (say) J.K. Rowling.
I can very much see the situation you described and I love it. Lots of potential for intrigue and interplay.
I do imagine vampires, though, as having huge swathes of territories, but major vampires have bigger territories that tend to completely encompass the territories of minor vampires. I guess kind of like predators in the wild; a lion pride will have a huge territory, and say two cheetahs might hunt in that same area, as well as 3 packs of hyenas, a dozen jackels, etc.
The city in the setting is run by a 1500 YO vampire, has a population of about 2 million, and about four or five other vampires live there - all under the age of about 300. But the entireity of Australia is probably split amongst about 3 major vampires - west, north east, south east. Somewhere like China, India or the USA would be split more finely due to the high population, though I'd imagine for example that California would be split three ways and some of the sparser states would all be under the control of one major vampire.
He can just use his ghoul's credit card - perfectly traceable, it just doesn't trace back to him.
Yeah, but ghouls need to be replaced every 20 or 30 years for best results and who has time for that? If humans get onto this whole bitcoin thing, then, well, they'll be set forever.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (25 days later)
Oh, on the subject of ghouls - did I mention that ghouls stop ageing until they stop drinking blood? I probably, did, right?
Huh. No, you didn't. Useful - that means you can train up a butler and keep him pretty much indefinitely.
It also means that vampires might be able to advertise and find volunteers for immortality.
it can mean your ghoul might need to be... weaned, lest it stops aging and loses its cover.
Nah, the solution to that is make-up. Start dying your hair a colour just a touch different to its natural colour and everyone will think you're going grey and hiding it.
I do imagine vampires, though, as having huge swathes of territories, but major vampires have bigger territories that tend to completely encompass the territories of minor vampires. I guess kind of like predators in the wild; a lion pride will have a huge territory, and say two cheetahs might hunt in that same area, as well as 3 packs of hyenas, a dozen jackels, etc.
Hmmmm. So, minor vampires are usually under the protection of major ones. And then the minor vampires are expected to deal with minor threats so that the major vampire doesn't have to bother about them (and a minor vampire who fails to deal with, say, a reporter nosing about in the wrong place will anger the local major vampire and then will probably not want to hang around after that).
Yeah, but ghouls need to be replaced every 20 or 30 years for best results and who has time for that? If humans get onto this whole bitcoin thing, then, well, they'll be set forever.
...I see the point.
On the subject of human-breeding, it's easy to imagine different vampires producing different lines of humans - different flavours, as it were.
These flavour lines might be jealously guarded (look at some of the things that humans breeding flowers have got up to for inspiration) - a traditional (perhaps somewhat extravagant) gift in certain circumstances might be a eunuch (so you can't breed from him) of their own private flavour line (and a major thrust in modern biological research might come from a vampire who has collected a few of these eunuchs and wants to breed from them because he likes the taste)
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (26 days later)
Useful - that means you can train up a butler and keep him pretty much indefinitely.
Exactly - a good ghoul is an investment that will continue delivering returns almost indefinitely.
It also means that vampires might be able to advertise and find volunteers for immortality.
Immortality with the catch of being a vampire's thrall with your will forever subservient to hers is not ideal.
Start dying your hair a colour just a touch different to its natural colour and everyone will think you're going grey and hiding it.
Haha, yes.
So, minor vampires are usually under the protection of major ones [in exchange for taking care of the chores].
Yes, though the definition of "protection" and "chores" will vary from place to place.
and a major thrust in modern biological research might come from a vampire who has collected a few of these eunuchs and wants to breed from them because he likes the taste
The first human clone was done 50 years ago, simply because an Eritrean vampire lord had been given a specimen from an extremely rare line, and said specimen was beginning to get a bit old. And, well, the lord didn't want to be without his fantastically rare treat.
Now, all that stuff people are saying about monsanto - terminator genes, infertile offspring, all the rest of it? That was started by a vampire trying to protect her bloodline. It works, too. You clone them or breed them with IVF and the children have the most noxious blood. Ugh.
More stuff to ponder: can vampires gain and lose weight? Can they train to have buff muscles? Does their hair continue to grow? On the face of it you'd think not, because they're magically animated corpses, but if the magic is strong enough to grow a new arm and brand new muscles that go with it, then surely it'd be strong enough to make an existing muscle more buff.
I can see a vampire having control over whether e.g. their hair grows or they gain weight, since they don't have to breathe but can pretend to. But if a vampire gluts on blood, where does that extra mass go?
Actually, canonically I believe vampires don't poop. Does that mean that vampires are just choc full of haemoglobin that they've accumulated over decades of blood meals? I suppose the cleanest way is for it to come out in their breath, but they don't need to breathe. Do they sweat it out? Or does their blood just become more and more treacle-like over time? That's kind of a cool thought.
When a vampirezombie (vombie? zompire?) grows from a piece of vampire heart, where does the extra mass come from? After all, you're talking at least 60kg of stuff, you can't get that just from dust.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (27 days later)
Immortality with the catch of being a vampire's thrall with your will forever subservient to hers is not ideal.
Vampires would hardly be the first to put only the benefits in the advert and ignore the downsides until much, much later.
Yes, though the definition of "protection" and "chores" will vary from place to place.
Naturally. Which also raises the possibility of a young "nomadic" vampire, wandering quietly from territory to territory, trying very hard not to anger anyone too much, looking for a territory of his own... perhaps one whose previous territory was Hiroshima (and he probably still makes geiger counters go crazy...)
Now, all that stuff people are saying about monsanto - terminator genes, infertile offspring, all the rest of it? That was started by a vampire trying to protect her bloodline. It works, too. You clone them or breed them with IVF and the children have the most noxious blood. Ugh.
Ha! Yeah, I can certainly see a biotech firm as under vampire control.
More stuff to ponder: can vampires gain and lose weight? Can they train to have buff muscles? Does their hair continue to grow?
Hmmmm.
Mythologically, vampires can fly. This seems to imply some control over their own mass. Perhaps a vampire can change mass at will?
The mythological vampire is unchanging, frozen at the apparent appearance and age they were when turned. (This allows for the creepy little girl vampire as well). This implies they can't grow hair or lose weight; though if a long-haired vampire gets his hair cut it probably regenerates in the same way as if he gets an arm cut off.
I suppose the cleanest way is for it to come out in their breath, but they don't need to breathe. Do they sweat it out?
Tears, probably. When a vampire cries, he loses the extra blood mass. Sweat can work, but it seems a bit of a giveaway. Or when he takes his blood to keep his ghouls ghouled.
When a vampirezombie (vombie? zompire?) grows from a piece of vampire heart, where does the extra mass come from?
...I'm going to go back to "vampires change mass at will" here, I think.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (27 days later)
Which also raises the possibility of a young "nomadic" vampire, wandering quietly from territory to territory, trying very hard not to anger anyone too much, looking for a territory of his own...
Yeah, I liken vampires to lions a lot in this way - with lionesses and cubs being baby vampires, and full-grown lions being very old vampires.
Mythologically, vampires can fly.
I don't think my vampires can fly, except as bats.
Tears, probably.
Does that mean vampires cry blood? That seems too gross for my sensibilities.
Canonically, the vampire's digestive system fills with a horrible, dark, stinky slurry that is inserted into a freshly dead human's heart to reanimate them - I would assume the un-eaten blood would be used partially for that, though that's not very elegant.
Probably the most elegant solution is that as a vampire feeds, she releases her waste products into the jannisary or victim's blood in kind. Depending on how exactly a vampire physically processes her victims' blood, it could spread diseases, cause haemolitic disease if the blood types aren't compatible (suddenly AB+ janissaries are looking good!), or it could simply be excreted in short order by the human's kidneys.
It also has the pleasing side effect of a vampire who is not able to feed "naturally" getting sick, wasting away, and so on. Would explain why something like True Blood hasn't been invented - but I suppose a vampire could easily enough just excrete the nasties by effectively spitting or vomiting them out... but it's less gross than crying.
...I'm going to go back to "vampires change mass at will" [to explain where the extra mass comes from when they regenerate], I think.
I don't know. Even if we let vampires fly, I can see the pseudo-sciency handwavey part being that they stop the higgs field from interacting with the molecules that make up their body, so they're not affected by gravity like a normal person is.
To grow an entire vampire from a scrap of a heart, assuming the vampire body looks like a human body on the inside, you're going to need carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and all kinds of trace elements. These can't be created from nothing, at least not easily. The fact the growth would be very slow is a bit of an out at least, because you can have it happen as raw materials become available. Looking around my house, there's wood, which would be a source of carbon, and probably dead cockroaches which would be a source of carbon and nitrogen both, and hydrogen's easy.
... actually, carbon dioxide and nitrogen are both plentiful in the air, as is water vapour. I'd assume the magic of the heart would work on the CO^2, H^(2)O N^2 in the air, using that as raw material. So if you kept a vampire heart in a vacuum or nitrogen atmosphere you'd be safe from it regenerating, but in real life such controlled conditions don't exist.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (27 days later)
Yeah, I liken vampires to lions a lot in this way - with lionesses and cubs being baby vampires, and full-grown lions being very old vampires.
That... works surprisingly well, really.
I don't think my vampires can fly, except as bats.
Here's a question, then. When a vampire turns into a bat - or bat-like mammal - where does the extra mass go?
Or does one vampire turn into several hundred bats?
Or does the vampire turn into one ultra-dense bat and mess with gravity in order to be able to fly?
Does that mean vampires cry blood?
That's what I was thinking, yes, but I like the idea that the vampire releases waste products into the blood when feeding. It ties in nicely with the whole jannissary idea - the waste products themselves are addictive (and will show up - probably as "unidentified narcotic" - in a blood test).
Actually, that raises a point - if a vampire bites an athlete before a major race, and that athlete is then selected for a random drug screening, does the athlete get disqualified?
And is there a drug lord somewhere dealing in a highly addictive narcotic only known as "vampire spit"?
Even if we let vampires fly, I can see the pseudo-sciency handwavey part being that they stop the higgs field from interacting with the molecules that make up their body, so they're not affected by gravity like a normal person is.
That works for flight, yes.
... actually, carbon dioxide and nitrogen are both plentiful in the air, as is water vapour. I'd assume the magic of the heart would work on the CO2, H2O N2 in the air, using that as raw material. So if you kept a vampire heart in a vacuum or nitrogen atmosphere you'd be safe from it regenerating, but in real life such controlled conditions don't exist.
That... alright, that works out surprisingly well for vampire regeneration. Does this mean that if you have a vampire, and continually cut off his arm, you can start converting the atmosphere of (say) a sealed room into vampire arms?
How soon would this start causing a problem if you did it on the International Space Station?
Actually, could a vampire on the Space Station (who doesn't need to breathe, after all, and let's say he's somehow protected from sunlight) deliberately use this in order to asphyxiate the entire human crew?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (27 days later)
When a vampire turns into a bat - or bat-like mammal - where does the extra mass go?
I was thinking that when I was talking about it and I don't have a satisfactory answer. The obvious thing is for the "gravity has less effect on them" explanation, but I'm not sure I like that as there's more transformation in the canon that isn't so easily explained and in fact canonically has additional weight or disappearing weight.
For example, there's a gargoyle. In his natural form, he's fifteen feet tall, with an additional fifteen feet of tail, and weighs about 3 tons (he's made of sandstone after all). However, he can change into a human form, where he looks like a standard 7 foot tall human but is really a 7 foot tall sandstone golem with a thin veneer of human skin on the outside, weighing about 260kg. This naturally causes issues if he transforms in places that can't handle the weight of a giraffe.
Also, he doesn't need to eat, but can choose to, and he regenerates, too, but far, far slower than a vampire. Presumably he can get the extra mass from the air, too, but he's made of rarer minerals (potassium, sodium, aluminium and so on), so he's probably getting them from a combination of the air and, like, doing stuff like making voids in his body. He eats rocks quite a lot, so after losing a limb or something he probably will just eat even more rocks to regain the mass.
Oh, and some more fun facts in case you want a thread to pick on - he's magically bound to protect a certain vampire, through a spell that has to be refreshed every ten years or so. He's pretty chill about this, as he was basically created to protect whoever owns him at the time. Finally, a few hundred years ago, a vandal carved his name ("Julias"[sic]) into the pedestal that the gargoyle sits on, and ever since the gargoyle and everyone known to the gargoyle - including his wife - has only been able to refer to him by that name, and have forgotten what, if anything, he used to be called.
So yes, to go back to the original point - transformation and additional mass is a glaring problem in this universe as it stands. Instant transformation can't be explained away as easily as regeneration. I think I might ask that at the upcoming world-building thread, if you don't have any ideas?
[vampire spit being waste] ties in nicely with the whole jannissary idea - the waste products themselves are addictive
Yeah, it explains how the effect lasts, because there's no reason they can't persist in the blood. Adding this to canon.
Actually, that raises a point - if a vampire bites an athlete before a major race, and that athlete is then selected for a random drug screening, does the athlete get disqualified?
Not unless the vampire spit has been identified as a PED, which, hey, maybe it has and we don't know it.
And is there a drug lord somewhere dealing in a highly addictive narcotic only known as "vampire spit"?
No doubt, and the DEA probably thinks it's the worst street name since bath salts. If only they knew...
Does this mean that if you have a vampire, and continually cut off his arm, you can start converting the atmosphere of (say) a sealed room into vampire arms?
Why the heck not?
How soon would this start causing a problem if you did it on the International Space Station?
Hell yes!
Actually, could a vampire on the Space Station deliberately use this in order to asphyxiate the entire human crew?
Yep, but I think once a vampire gets onto the ISS, waiting weeks for arms to grow back without being detected is probably a bit of a hassle - better off just killing them the old fashioned way.
That said, if you really want to assassinate the astronauts and making Challenger/Columbia happen a third time isn't doing it for you, sneak a little sliver of vampire heart into a tool box somewhere.
Then again - oxygen isn't a very abundant in the body - oh wait no, I was wrong, it is the most abundant element in the body by mass and the second most by atomic percent. Ohh, because the body's mostly water. Silly me!
Damnit, I was about to say that because of the high amount of hydrogen, the ISS would do well to have a tiny piece of vampire heart in a tiny vacuum chamber for "in case of hydrogen gas leak break glass". I was also going to propose it as an alternative CO2 scrubber, but it would just remove CO2 from the air and the oxygen would be lost because the ratio of C to O in the body is 1:2. How annoying, but still, it remains potentially useful.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (28 days later)
transformation and additional mass is a glaring problem in this universe as it stands.
...okay.
Try this, then. Imagine, for a moment, a two-dimensional universe. Like a flat, vertical membrane, on which two-dimensional creatures live and move. (Something like Flatland). Along with this, imagine a carrot. A normal, three-dimensional carrot. The carrot is poking sideways into the 2D universe.
Now, from the perspective of the 2D universe's inhabitants, the carrot is a circle. But the carrot can do one thing that the 2D universe's inhabitants can't do, which is move in the third dimension. And whenever the carrot moves in the third dimension, as far as the 2D universe's inhabitants can tell, it either shrinks or grows.
Let's assume that the 2D universe's version of gravity only works in two dimensions. Then it only affects the part of the carrot that intersects with the 2D universe. As far as the 2D inhabitants can see, the carrot can grow (up to a maximum size) or shrink as well, changing its mass in the process.
Moreover, if someone cuts off a bit of the carrot at maximum size, it can shrink, and in the process it seems to instantly repair itself; though it still feels the pain, and if it returns to its old size, its injury becomes visible again.
Now imagine that vampires (and gargoyles) are kind of four-dimensional creatures. Your average vampire is a reanimated corpse on the one end of the 'carrot', and a bat on the other. (Notably, this means he's always the same bat; if a conversationist puts a radio tag on a vampire in bat form, then the vampire becomes human and goes back to bat form, he'll still have the radio tag as a bat - despite not having it stuck to his ear as a human, and quite possibly not having it interact with the normal universe while he's in human form).
So, where does all this extra carrot-matter come from? Simple; vampires already regenerate from air, now they just need a bit more air to regenerate from.
Same idea goes for the gargoyle; though there, one end of the 'carrot' is a three-ton creature and the small end is at least human shaped.
Of course, this only works for a shapeshifter who's limited to two forms (and presumably any intermediate form, though that might be as difficult to maintain as balancing a ball on the tip of a pen instead of letting it fall to one or the other side). A multi-form shape shifter would either be some sort of caterpillar-like thing in four dimensions (a vampire who can shift to bat or wolf but has to pass through human form if moving from one to the other, for example) or something a good deal more complicated. It also means that shifting can give the appearance of instant healing, but the original body remains injured and must heal (or regenerate) in its own time.
It also implies that shape shifters can interact with each other outside the normal plane of the universe (e.g. two vampires in bat form meet each other; the outside-the-universe human form of one vampire can punch the outside-the-universe human form of the other vampire. To an external observer, the two bats approach each other, then one is suddenly, forcefully repelled away from the other for no apparent reason. This also makes the gargoyle a great anti-vampire guard - he can instant recognise shape shifters and even when he's in human form, he's still able to bring three tons of muscle down in a place that most shape shifters do not expect to be punched).
Not unless the vampire spit has been identified as a PED, which, hey, maybe it has and we don't know it.
Vampire spit might not just be one compound. It might be half-a-dozen or more. Any one of which might be a performance enhancing drug.
No doubt, and the DEA probably thinks it's the worst street name since bath salts. If only they knew...
How does the drug lord get the stuff, that's the question... does he have a bunch of vampire-zombies tied up in his basement that he milks every now and then?
I was also going to propose it as an alternative CO2 scrubber, but it would just remove CO2 from the air and the oxygen would be lost because the ratio of C to O in the body is 1:2. How annoying, but still, it remains potentially useful.
I fail to see what sort of emergency could be so terrible that it can be made in any way better by introducing an immortal, feral, near-unkillable human-eating monster in an enclosed space with the crew.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (30 days later)
Before anything else I just want to say the extra dimension idea was AMAZING, it was in fact RIDICULOUSLY GOOD, it was in fact SO RIDICULOUSLY GOOD I wanted to express my appreciation. I considered reddit gold and then thought the more rational thing to do would be to buy some malaria bed nets, so I bought 5 malaria nets in your honour by way of thanks:
https://www.againstmalaria.com/MyNets.aspx?DonationID=205449
(If you're not actually at all interested in effective altruism, then I'd be happy to buy you gold by way of apology, but a month of reddit gold is approximately the same price as a malaria bed net, so...)
But, yes, not only have I read Flatterland (highly recommend it, btw), but my husband is a mathematician who participates in something he calls "recreational mathematics" of higher dimensional spheres, so he was all too happy for me to pick his brain about vampires, transformation, and conservation of mass. I guess that is why I was so very, extremely, inexorably impressed by the idea.
So, this is what he helped me work out. I use Flatland metaphors a lot, because it's the only way I can get my head around 4 dimensional geometry.
the 4th dimension is not really a part of our universe except when it is used by magical beings in some way or another. In other words, if the universe is flatland, there is void "above" and "below" flatland except where vampires, gargoyles, werewolves etc "stick out" - no physics/etc to speak of
things can only stick into the 4th dimension as a result of magic; possibly, magic was invented in a 4 dimensional universe
things are only able to be "at right angles" to our universe. This prevents creatures from looking "distorted" by being askew
transformations look pretty much how we'd expect them to look, with slowly changing from one to the other. However, things like wings and tails can suddenly appear as free-floating spheres and then slowly become thicker and thicker until they "join" to the main body, which is just freaky cool: http://imgur.com/a/cxCD9
transformations happen the same way every single time.
this whole thing has some interesting connotations for how werewolves might work, since I have a whole werewolf concept based on menstruation but I'm very protective of it and I don't want to share it in a public forum, even buried deep in a month-old worldbuilding wednesday thread
vampires and werewolves, being human-based, lack intuition for the 4-dimensional world. Their bat, wolf and human eyes just do not see through the 4th dimension; after all, there are no photons there.
a "native" of the 4 dimensions, such as a gargoyle, has eyes that are capable of seeing other "projections" into the 4th dimension. This makes such creatures great guards, as they can see the projections of vampires and werewolves and many other transforming creatures in the 4th dimension at all times.
The gargoyle has three forms: stone gargoyle at one end, gargoyle in the center, and human at the other end. During the day, because of plot at the moment, but probably for a legitimate reason when I think of one, the stone form is in our world with the other two forms "up" in the fourth dimension. Possibly it's where he goes to take a break, possibly it's how he actually 'eats', possibly his stone form has the most heightened senses for his guard duties, who knows???
OK, that's probably enough higher dimensional stuff. Thanks again for the idea. It's excellent.
Not unless the vampire spit has been identified as a PED, which, hey, maybe it has and we don't know it.
Vampire spit might not just be one compound. It might be half-a-dozen or more. Any one of which might be a performance enhancing drug.
Yep, I meant like, maybe one of the PEDs that has been identified is actually one of the components of vampire spit.
Sample dialog:
"Yes, our saliva contains something very valuable to humans. It's called albuterol."
"Albuterol... isn't that the asthma drug that can be used as a steroid when it's injected?"
"How do you think you humans discovered it?"
No doubt, and the DEA probably thinks it's the worst street name since bath salts. If only they knew... How does the drug lord get the stuff, that's the question... does he have a bunch of vampire-zombies tied up in his basement that he milks every now and then?
I don't see why not. Seems like a pretty safe source.
I was also going to propose it as an alternative CO2 scrubber, but it would just remove CO2 from the air and the oxygen would be lost because the ratio of C to O in the body is 1:2. How annoying, but still, it remains potentially useful. I fail to see what sort of emergency could be so terrible that it can be made in any way better by introducing an immortal, feral, near-unkillable human-eating monster in an enclosed space with the crew.
Oh no, you have just a tiny sliver of heart. It'll slowly regenerate, but once it's about the size of an orange you take another sliver, put it in a vacuum box, and throw the rest out of the airlock. Of course, a few hundred years from now, that 'space junk' might find its way in the aerated cargo hold of a space-ship, and, well, that would be quite the horror movie plot once it comes of age, isn't it?
u/CCC_037 [+3] (30 days later)
Wow. This is the first time anyone's ever bought malaria nets on my behalf.
I think it's a great idea!
I've also read Flatterland. It's a great book. (I particularly liked the negatively-curved 'Platterland' section).
So. On to the 4D vampires. Most of your bullet points are either perfectly logical extensions of the idea, or straightforward simplifications that make it easier to deal with. On a couple, though, I have a few further comments:
However, things like wings and tails can suddenly appear as free-floating spheres and then slowly become thicker and thicker until they "join" to the main body, which is just freaky cool: http://imgur.com/a/cxCD9
It is!
But now imagine your gargoyle, in human form, is trapped in - say, a broom closet. A room just big enough to hold his human form and not big enough for the full thing. He starts to shift, and his tail appears as an apparently disconnected sphere outside the room. It extends towards the door, and... what happens when it hits?
The actual force does not come from the part of the tail in out 3D universe. It comes from the part of the tail trying to push into our universe, trying to displace the door. So the direction of the force is from somewhere outside the normal three dimensions - it's trying to push the door in the opposite direction, i.e. to shove it outside the universe, in a way that the door, being a non-magical substance, cannot move.
(Of course, there's a whole range of possible doors to consider here - from flimsy wooden ones to thick steel safe doors...)
vampires and werewolves, being human-based, lack intuition for the 4-dimensional world. Their bat, wolf and human eyes just do not see through the 4th dimension; after all, there are no photons there.
Sensible. But just because they can's see doesn't mean they can't act. A vampire (bat form) could still try to use his human form to punch the human form of another vampire (bat form), even if he has to guess exactly where to aim his punches. (This does mean that he could get confused by a genuine bat that just looks like a bat-form vampire for some reason).
The gargoyle has three forms: stone gargoyle at one end, gargoyle in the center, and human at the other end. During the day, because of plot at the moment, but probably for a legitimate reason when I think of one, the stone form is in our world with the other two forms "up" in the fourth dimension. Possibly it's where he goes to take a break, possibly it's how he actually 'eats', possibly his stone form has the most heightened senses for his guard duties, who knows???
Hmmmmm. He's sounding a lot like some form of artificial life to me. A robot made by hyper-advanced technology. Which means that the same hyper-advanced technology might have inserted any number of forced behavioural routines (think Asimov's three laws of robotics - not the same laws, of course, but something along those lines).
This leads to a few options:
Perhaps he was intended specifically as a vampire killer. Since vampires are killed by sunlight and active at night, he only needs to be active at night.
Perhaps he is (partially) solar powered, and his stone form is covered in hyper-advanced solar cells; he's programmed to return to it every day in order to remain powered up.
Even in stone form, he can still seriously inconvenience passing vampires - if his (human, currently extra-dimensional) form grabs the bat form of a passing human-form vampire, then what can the vampire do? He can't see what's got him, he can't walk away, he can't change shape, and ooooh, how long until the sunlight coming in through that window gets here...
"Yes, our saliva contains something very valuable to humans. It's called albuterol."
"Albuterol... isn't that the asthma drug that can be used as a steroid when it's injected?"
"How do you think you humans discovered it?"
Ha! And it makes sense for vampire spit to include some sort of stimulant, to hide the fact that the subject has been weakened by loss of blood...
I don't see why not. Seems like a pretty safe source.
Right up until some idiot DEA cop breaks into the basement, thinks they're humans, and starts cutting them loose...
Oh no, you have just a tiny sliver of heart. It'll slowly regenerate, but once it's about the size of an orange you take another sliver, put it in a vacuum box, and throw the rest out of the airlock. Of course, a few hundred years from now, that 'space junk' might find its way in the aerated cargo hold of a space-ship, and, well, that would be quite the horror movie plot once it comes of age, isn't it?
Nah, that "space junk" will get a full dose of sunlight in a couple of hours. (Actually, instead of throwing it out the airlock, you can save a lot of energy by just holding the bit you want to get rid of up in front of a sun-facing window...)
Also, I must admit, I was thinking faster regeneration.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (30 days later)
Glad you enjoy the bed nets. I was worried I might be committing a reddit faux-pas, but I really am very appreciative of this conversation!
In re-writing a transformation scene, I realised something else: clothing. The second you start transforming, your clothes disappear. For modesty's sake, my husband and I worked out a system a 4D being could use to get what amounts to a morphsuit on their entire "length", which they could then cut holes in the head/etc for appearances, but it seemed so complicated that the average 4D being would prefer to either just have clothes on its two 'end forms', or buy the number of outfits necessary to fill out most of the intermediate forms, leading to an odd sort of transformation that might resemble a "one photo a day" transition timeline or something.
(Hubs also told me that 4D beings would weigh 10^13 times their 'earth mass' unless they protruded only, say, 1nm into the 4th dimension, so I've decided to keep them 'short', which means that they wouldn't need too many outfits).
A room just big enough to hold his human form and not big enough for the full thing. He starts to shift, and his tail appears as an apparently disconnected sphere outside the room. It extends towards the door, and... what happens when it hits?
A twenty minute conversation with my resident higher-dimensions expert. We've worked out that it would be a 3D analog of what happens if you punch a hole in a painting and then press it back into 2 dimensions. Your tail is going to push the door until it breaks (a 4D creature has a huge mass as discussed before, so you have plenty of momentum to do this; also explains a vampire's super strength, that momentum, actually). The door is going to break like a karate board; the ends of it that your tail is pushing are still going to be joined in the 3D world. When you are no longer pushing the door into the 4th dimension, it's going to spring back. The end result will be, like I said, the 3D equivilent of a picture that's had a hole punched in it and then made flat again - so it'll look mostly OK, but there will be some broken parts, and some jagged voids maybe in the inside of the door, uneven surface, etc.
there's a whole range of possible doors to consider here - from flimsy wooden ones to thick steel safe doors...
Very few doors are going to give something with a 4D creature's mass any problem, but it is feasible, especially if a mage were to build a magic, 4D door.
He's sounding a lot like some form of artificial life to me.
Yeah, he's a golem now I really think about it rather than a gargoyle. Canonically, he was carved in ancient egypt as a temple guardian or something; it's all vague enough that it can be modified. But he would absolutely work under some behavioral laws, and be 'programmed' not to mind them. They're obviously not too rigid as he's had time for a family and hobbies and whatnot, but hey, who cares if the help have hobbies as long as they're there when the vampire hunters come, right?
Perhaps he was intended specifically as a vampire killer. Since vampires are killed by sunlight and active at night, he only needs to be active at night.
Probably a good idea; he was at one point the guardian of a large cathedral, and the resident vampire took a liking to him, 'reprogrammed' him by casting the right spell at the right time, and, well, the rest is history as they say.
Perhaps he is (partially) solar powered, and his stone form is covered in hyper-advanced solar cells; he's programmed to return to it every day in order to remain powered up.
Probably the best idea. His power requirements can be so great that he really needs the full amount of daylight to be sufficiently charged, but in an emergency he can change with no problem. That said, he is made of sandstone, and I'm not sure there's a universe in which solar cells could look identical to sandstone? (I guess in a universe where sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?)
if his (human, currently extra-dimensional) form grabs the bat form of a passing human-form vampire, then what can the vampire do? He can't see what's got him, he can't walk away, he can't change shape, and ooooh, how long until the sunlight coming in through that window gets here...
This is probably one of the 'features' of him having a human form at all, which I still haven't got a super good explanation for. He's white and 7 feet tall - maybe I should give him a race lift, too many of my characters are white anyway, but his height is something I don't want to change and it would be damn conspicuous 5,000 years ago when he was supposedly created (maybe his 'creator' just wiped all his memories from the past 70,000 years so he'd work better? Maybe this guy has a wife from the demon world who he was with for 60,000 years who has been hunting him down for the last 5,000 and finally has found him today??? that's a worry)
Right up until some idiot DEA cop breaks into the basement, thinks they're humans, and starts cutting them loose...
I am getting so, so many plot hooks. VOMBIE INVASION.
Also, I must admit, I was thinking faster regeneration.
How fast would it be? Hmm. An arm weighs about 4kg, and takes two days to regenerate, so a, say, 80kg vampire can regenerate 2kg of arm a day. That's 0.025% of body weight per day, assuming the respiration/magic comes from the body as a whole. If the magic comes from the heart alone, that's a ~300g heart generating 2kg of flesh, so a heart can appropriately enough generate 666% of its mass in flesh per day - that's probably where we'd go.
So, let's say you have a 1g heart sliver becoming an 80kg vampire:
Day Heart Weight Total Weight 1 1g 1g 2 7g 7g 3 44g 44g 4 ~300g ~300g So after 4 days you've got a full heart, and after 40 more days you've got an 80kg vampire. So yes, the regeneration is fast if you're already a full size vampire - 2kg of flesh a day is heaps - but if you're growing a vombie from a sliver of heart, it's going to take more than a month. It'll take 2-3 days for a beheaded vampire to grow a new head, though.
Also here's the transformation scene I wrote up real quick:
And so, he begins to change. First, his clothes disappear, him standing naked in the middle of the room, seemingly unperturbed by this. Slowly, each part of him grows larger and minutely more beige in colour. Small hovering blobs appear behind his shoulders and near the floor, beginning to grow little tendrils, corresponding to ones in neighbouring blobs and on his body, as they get bigger, undulating ever so slightly before joining together to form a solid mass of wings and a tail.
Naturally, he grows heavier; the floorboards creak as the weight that is on them changes; he holds his tail and hands on the ground in an attempt to distribute his weight evenly, but there’s a soft crack as one of the weaker floorboards yields to his mass.
He crouches on the floor, holding his head close to the floor so he doesn’t hit himself on the roof. When standing straight, he must be fully 15 feet tall, not including the tail, which adds an additional fifteen feet to his total length. His fingers and toes are both tipped in wicked, curved claws; he doesn’t have feet but a second set of dextrous ‘hands’. He’s a pale, sandy colour with some orange flourishes; the colour of sandstone. Folded at his back are a pair of batlike wings, each three times the size of his torso in area when fully stretched. His long tail snakes out from behind him.
and back:
He begins transforming back; all his limbs shortening, his wings and tails turning back into spindly, floating sausages before disappearing, and his body becoming a more human shade. When he finishes his transformation, at the very last second, his clothes reappear, somehow unharmed by the whole process.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (30 days later)
In re-writing a transformation scene, I realised something else: clothing. The second you start transforming, your clothes disappear.
Why? They're not glued to your body.
Clothing - normal, mundane clothing - consists basically of a series of tubes of cloth, which rest on your body and follow its movement in the normal three dimensions.
As per your earlier bullet points, a non-magical item (such as a shirt) does not normally move in the fourth dimensions. This implies that it somehow 'sticks' to the three-dimensional surface of our world - and the occupant of those clothes, sliding four-dimensionally through them, is not going to provide anything like the force necessary to overcome that stickiness. Rather, the clothes will 'fall' around the three-dimensional body.
When a vampire changes to a bat, this results in the clothes crumpling around him; when the gargoyle shifts out of his human form, this results in seams ripping and tearing and his trousers getting thoroughly ruined by his tail (so he, at least, probably wants to get undressed first, just to keep the cost of continually buying more clothes manageable).
(Hubs also told me that 4D beings would weigh 10^13 times their 'earth mass' unless they protruded only, say, 1nm into the 4th dimension, so I've decided to keep them 'short', which means that they wouldn't need too many outfits).
This isn't going to fly. I'll trust his calculations, but if the mass of a 4D being is the mass of the entire 4D being and not just the current 3D slice, then the bat-form vampire is going to weigh exactly the same as the human-form vampire. And whichever way round you handle that, it just isn't going to work.
I recommend going with the claim that there are no Higgs bosons in 4D space if anyone asks, and just treat the creature as if it were the mass of the slice currently in the 3D universe.
(Also, looking at your transformation scene, I notice you have the gargoyle's mass increasing as he shifts).
We've worked out that it would be a 3D analog of what happens if you punch a hole in a painting and then press it back into 2 dimensions.
Okay, that works well. (And even if the door is strong enough to resist having a gargoyle's tail slamming into it - I'm thinking a bank vault door or similar - he can still use the apparently disconnected end of his tail to feel for and pull the handle on the far side. Which also means that if the bank vault can be opened from the inside, then he can open it from the outside...).
Very few doors are going to give something with a 4D creature's mass any problem, but it is feasible, especially if a mage were to build a magic, 4D door.
A 4D door isn't going to stop an intelligent gargoyle for long, unless the room it's securing also has nice, strong 4D walls...
Come to think of it, a suitably knowledgeable mage (or an Atlantean) could create a corridor with 4D walls just a fraction outside the universe on both sides. Done correctly, a normal, 3D human can stroll down there no problem, but no shapeshifter can squeeze in... and it's going to annoy vampires and werewolves like anything, because they can't see why they can't squeeze in. (I imagine it'll feel like some kind of invisible anti-vampire wall...)
But he would absolutely work under some behavioral laws, and be 'programmed' not to mind them. They're obviously not too rigid as he's had time for a family and hobbies and whatnot, but hey, who cares if the help have hobbies as long as they're there when the vampire hunters come, right?
Sounds sensible. Plus, having hobbies gives him something more to fight for.
Probably a good idea; he was at one point the guardian of a large cathedral, and the resident vampire took a liking to him, 'reprogrammed' him by casting the right spell at the right time, and, well, the rest is history as they say.
The right spell being the Atlantean equivalent of "login: root password: ******** command: Protect me, maximum priority" or something along those lines, I take it.
What happens if some of his programmed desires conflict? Such as, for example, if he has to protect a vampire but also has a lower-level compulsion to kill vampires? Does he take up hunting other vampires as a hobby?
Probably the best idea. His power requirements can be so great that he really needs the full amount of daylight to be sufficiently charged, but in an emergency he can change with no problem. That said, he is made of sandstone, and I'm not sure there's a universe in which solar cells could look identical to sandstone? (I guess in a universe where sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?)
Yeah, these are definitely going to have to be "sufficiently advanced" solar cells.
This is probably one of the 'features' of him having a human form at all, which I still haven't got a super good explanation for.
He was intended as a protector for his builder's daughter. Like all little girls, she loved dressing up dolls, so the builder made sure he had a humanoid form, suitable for being dressed up.
His builder expected that he would occasionally be required to wear a tuxedo (or equivalently formal outfit) and serve drinks.
He was built with the expectation that he would be occasionally tracking down humans. His builder didn't want people to be able to escape him by running into an eight-foot tunnel.
Most weapons and equipment are designed to be wielded by human-shaped limbs. His builder wanted to make sure he could use such items if necessary. (It's a pain to pull a trigger with a wicked, curved claw, after all).
(Note that none of this requires him to be anywhere near average human height... and as a security guard, being huge is better for intimidation in any case).
maybe his 'creator' just wiped all his memories from the past 70,000 years so he'd work better?
Huh. Now, that's quite a plot hook.
How fast would it be? Hmm. An arm weighs about 4kg, and takes two days to regenerate
...okay, I was thinking "arm-takes-five-minutes-to-regenerate" type horror-movie-monster regeneration. At your speed, yes, I can see how the bit of vombie heart could be safely used on a space station. (Still not quite sure how it helps, but at least there's no killer monsters getting loose anymore.)
[transformation scene]
Neat.
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
OK, the shirt thing is complicated, and we worked out there were two ways you could do it: you could invent a physics explanation, involving transforming beings creating a localised "4D field" for wont of a better word, and that would result in the clothes tearing as you described. Or, without the particular physics explanation my husband thought was cool, you end up with what I described.
This implies that it somehow 'sticks' to the three-dimensional surface of our world - and the occupant of those clothes, sliding four-dimensionally through them, is not going to provide anything like the force necessary to overcome that stickiness. Rather, the clothes will 'fall' around the three-dimensional body.
Basically, the analogy we had was imagine if you were visiting Flatland and you were using your finger as your Flatland avatar. You buy a piece of flatlander clothing to put around your finger, wrapping it around your finger and clipping it in place. Then if you move so much as a micron up or down, your clothing 'disappears', but it remains clipped to that part of your finger. Think of a rubber band.
If you wanted to have your finger stay in Flatland a lot and didn't want to go to the trouble of holding it exactly at the correct angle, you could grab a glove from the 3D world and put it on, so it would look like you were wearing a piece of flatlander clothing all the time. You could also ask a tailor in Flatland to make you a big piece of circular cloth with a slit cut in it, walk your finger into the center of it, and then repair the slit so your finger is "stuck" inside a disc of cloth. Then you pull your finger up and the cloth drapes around you, clipping it into place, to sort of make a "white sheet ghost costume" style piece of clothing for your finger. The 3D analog to this would be creating a sphere (out of something like diamond, probably) with a hole in it, climbing inside it, closing the hole in it around your body, and then moving in the fourth dimension so the sphere covers each 3D 'cross section' of your 4D body, morphsuit-style. You could then have someone paint each 3D 'frame' of the 'morphsuit' so it looks 'clothing-like' and cut holes in the head/hands/feet so it looks more socially acceptable, if you wanted to spend time on that.
If your tail appearing through a wooden door can push the door into the 4th dimension and then when the tail disappears again, the door 'snaps back', then moving 'up' in 4D space will push your clothing into the 4th dimension since it's fastened to you. Don't forget, a 4D being has so much mass that they have the momentum to do this.
It also means that you can kill someone by pushing them into the 4th dimension, or by having your tail go through them, etc. It also means that if you transform, anyone who is hugging you might asphyxiate.
I'll trust his calculations, but if the mass of a 4D being is the mass of the entire 4D being and not just the current 3D slice, then the bat-form vampire is going to weigh exactly the same as the human-form vampire. And whichever way round you handle that, it just isn't going to work.
I recommend going with the claim that there are no Higgs bosons in 4D space if anyone asks, and just treat the creature as if it were the mass of the slice currently in the 3D universe.
Yeah, I should have been clearer; this was always the plan. You can have a 4D 10^13 -human-mass vampire/bat hybrid, but "in real life" they only weigh the amount that their 3D slice weighs - so basically exactly what you'd expect. It would mean, though, that when moving in the 4th dimension they have a lot of momentum.
Done correctly, a normal, 3D human can stroll down there no problem, but no shapeshifter can squeeze in... and it's going to annoy vampires and werewolves like anything, because they can't see why they can't squeeze in.
Oh my god.... yes. And most werewolves aren't aware they're werewolves, so there are "humans" with these "silent" 4D protrusions who won't be able to enter secret anti-vampire vaults. It also is a good way for "Our Heroes" to be able to protect themselves from vampires among other things.
What happens if some of his programmed desires conflict? Such as, for example, if he has to protect a vampire but also has a lower-level compulsion to kill vampires? Does he take up hunting other vampires as a hobby?
Possibly. I'd look at it as basically one of Asimov's classic robot stories; lots of room for interpretation. However, the gargoyle has free will, a family, etc. At one point, his master was about to eat his girlfriend (who was snooping around his master's quarters), and he attacked his master to save her - though canonically this happened right before the binding spell was due to be strengthened, so he was probably at an unusually high "free will" level.
[explanations for him having a human form]
Love those, thankyou! Especially the tuxedo and serving drinks. Such things are probably surprisingly important, especially when at a moment's notice he can become a giant death gargoyle and protect you.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
You buy a piece of flatlander clothing to put around your finger ... Think of a rubber band.
Huh. I didn't look at it like that.
But there's still something else to consider. What you describe there is tight clothing. Now, consider loose clothing; a loop of Flatland cloth that encircles your finger but does not hold tightly to it. It follows your finger around, because as you push your finger back and forth you drag it along; but because it's not tight, it stays in Flatland when you move your finger up and down.
Considering these two analogies, it would seem to me that tight clothing moves with the shape as you described, while loose clothing is left in the normal 3D world. This has a few consequences:
The gargoyle's clothing never tears. If he wears loose clothing and shifts, then the clothing stays in the normal 3D world as he grows inside it, until it is sufficiently tight; then he drags it away with him. (This would presumably mean that different articles of clothing disappear at different times). On shifting back to human, the various articles of clothing are briefly visible at the points along the transformation that they are stuck on. (He can, with care, take them off and them put them on again in his human form)
Vampires, who turn to much smaller bats, tend to leave loose clothing behind. Consider a vampire, dressed in a tight swimming costume, and over that wearing a loose robe with a hood. When he turns into a bat, the swimming costume will stay on his human form; while the robe will collapse theatrically around him. He can then crawl out of the robe and fly away; when he turns back, he'll still be wearing the swimming costume.
If the vampire from the last bullet point turns into a bat, then crawls up the sleeve of the robe, then turns back, then at some point during his transformation the sleeve will count as "tight" and he'll pull the robe out of normal 3D space. Unlike the gargoyle, he's going to have a lot of trouble getting the robe back, because he's not a native 4D creature... (Actually, come to think of it, he'll pull the sleeve out, but if he's only pulling it a few nanometres out of the universe, then he'll only drag a little of the robe out of the universe with him; he's going to have half a robe following him everywhere...)
Then you pull your finger up and the cloth drapes around you, clipping it into place, to sort of make a "white sheet ghost costume" style piece of clothing for your finger.
This looks like what I'm thinking about loose clothing.
It also means that you can kill someone by pushing them into the 4th dimension, or by having your tail go through them, etc. It also means that if you transform, anyone who is hugging you might asphyxiate.
Important safety tip, then. Never hug a vampire.
Yeah, I should have been clearer; this was always the plan. You can have a 4D 10^13 -human-mass vampire/bat hybrid, but "in real life" they only weigh the amount that their 3D slice weighs - so basically exactly what you'd expect.
Okie dokie lokie.
It would mean, though, that when moving in the 4th dimension they have a lot of momentum.
Huh. That is an important point.
Though if they're taking noticeable delay to move a few nanometers in the fourth dimension, they're going to have very low velocity; that'll reduce their momentum somewhat.
And most werewolves aren't aware they're werewolves, so there are "humans" with these "silent" 4D protrusions who won't be able to enter secret anti-vampire vaults. It also is a good way for "Our Heroes" to be able to protect themselves from vampires among other things.
Huh. Now you have a potential werewolf detector. (Paint a few fancy runes around the entrance and see how many people think it's the runes somehow keeping shape shifters out)
I'd look at it as basically one of Asimov's classic robot stories; lots of room for interpretation.
Probably a good way to handle it.
At one point, his master was about to eat his girlfriend (who was snooping around his master's quarters), and he attacked his master to save her - though canonically this happened right before the binding spell was due to be strengthened, so he was probably at an unusually high "free will" level.
If he has to protect them both, by his rules, then he can attack the Master at any stage - free will or no - as long as he uses minimum necessary force to prevent the Master from damaging something he has to protect. (Asimov's robots could do the same - they could not harm a human, but if Stabby Mcstabberton the murderer is trying to stab someone, they could certainly grab his wrist and take his knife away, even if this led to his wrist being lightly bruised, because preventing a stabbing is worth a light bruising).
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Considering these two analogies, it would seem to me that tight clothing moves with the shape as you described, while loose clothing is left in the normal 3D world. This has a few consequences:
I'll provisionally accept this, though I think tight encompasses anything that is securely fastened to the body. For example, a pair of pants with the belt tightly cinched around the waist. In Flatland, imagine them 'nailing' a loose-fitting coat to one side of your finger - it would stay, though it might flop around weirdly as you describe with bats.
I imagine matter as preferring to "stay" in the 3D world, but being pushed into the 4th dimension as necessary.
(This would presumably mean that different articles of clothing disappear at different times).
BRB going to rewrite transformation scene to have his clothing disappear in order of tightness. He's probably going to be stuck in his underwear and sneakers.
(He can, with care, take them off and them put them on again in his human form)
Yes, just like you'd slide a rubber band down your finger to the appropriate 'segment' if you were visiting Flatland.
When a vampire turns into a bat, the swimming costume will stay on his human form; while the robe will collapse theatrically around him. He can then crawl out of the robe and fly away; when he turns back, he'll still be wearing the swimming costume.
Combines theatrical with practical, perfect for vampires (and now I have another transformation scene to retouch, probably). I agree that something like a robe that is 'draped' on the body rather than 'fastened' to it would be a concern. For vampires, who transform to bats rarely, they probably don't base their clothing choices around it. A gargoyle might though, preferring clothing that is tight and stretchy; kind of like the Hulk's magic pants.
Also, my husband raised the possibility that rather than being a 'line', beings with transformations exist in a 'torus', so someone with 3 forms can go between any of them at will. I'm quite fond of this, and it means that e.g. you could keep a cop's outfit 1nm "up" and a business suit 1nm "down" and have access to lots of quick disguises.
If the vampire turns into a bat, then crawls up the sleeve of the robe, then turns back, then at some point during his transformation the sleeve will count as "tight" and he'll pull the robe out of normal 3D space. Unlike the gargoyle, he's going to have a lot of trouble getting the robe back, because he's not a native 4D creature... (Actually, come to think of it, he'll pull the sleeve out, but if he's only pulling it a few nanometres out of the universe, then he'll only drag a little of the robe out of the universe with him; he's going to have half a robe following him everywhere...)
OMG. What a disaster! On a practical point of view though, the vampire stuck in his robe sleeve will transform back into human form and then cut the robe off his body, and then whatever bit he doesn't want to cut to (and hey, he could just cut a 1cm slice of his, say, butt off to make sure he's done with it). Sure, he'll have a robe surrounding him when he's next feeling batty, but it's not going to make him look ridiculous for the rest of his life.
Important safety tip, then. Never hug a vampire.
Unless you trust them not to destroy you... MUA HA HA HA HA
Though if they're taking noticeable delay to move a few nanometers in the fourth dimension, they're going to have very low velocity; that'll reduce their momentum somewhat.
Somewhat, but 10^13 is huge. I should ask my 4D expert for whether the momentum would be "huge" or "negligable" which I'm sure it's going to wind up being one or the other.
And most werewolves aren't aware they're werewolves, so there are "humans" with these "silent" 4D protrusions who won't be able to enter secret anti-vampire vaults. It also is a good way for "Our Heroes" to be able to protect themselves from vampires among other things.
Huh. Now you have a potential werewolf detector. (Paint a few fancy runes around the entrance and see how many people think it's the runes somehow keeping shape shifters out)
Also going to have big problems with reality looking weird to normies, though werewolves are rare enough (shit, let's think. The incidence is something like 0.005% of the general population, but only ~25% of those are going to know that they're werewolves).
If he has to protect them both, by his rules, then he can attack the Master at any stage - free will or no - as long as he uses minimum necessary force to prevent the Master from damaging something he has to protect.
He doesn't have to protect his girlfriend - he just wants to. That said, he didn't harm his master in any way in so doing, and could potentially have justified it by saying "people might have come looking for her and then found him and then burned his haven to the ground!!!!" to use it on his protection circuits. With between 5,000 and 70,000 years of apologetics in his brain, he's probably quite accomplished at doing what he really wants to do, though that always includes protecting his master too.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
I'll provisionally accept this, though I think tight encompasses anything that is securely fastened to the body.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. (Though, in your example of trousers with a belt, it might be that the belt, and upper part, of the trousers are tight while the legs are loose; then the trousers might vanish gradually, the belt going immediately and the legs sort of peeling away from out 3D universe as the shape changes further - stop at the right moment, and you have a pair of cloth anklets that look like they're just hovering and normal 3D people can't see what's holding it up...)
For vampires, who transform to bats rarely, they probably don't base their clothing choices around it.
Hmmmm. Wouldn't that depend on the vampire? I can imagine a juvenile vampire who's decided that flying is the best thing ever spending a lot of time as a bat - and keeping a pair of fairly tight pants, a tight shift and a pair of securely fastened jogging shoes on in case he suddenly needs to be "some guy on a late-night jog".
A gargoyle might though, preferring clothing that is tight and stretchy; kind of like the Hulk's magic pants.
I don't think 'stretchy' will help much. The moment it's tight enough to need to stretch, he'll be dragging it into the fourth dimension.
Also, my husband raised the possibility that rather than being a 'line', beings with transformations exist in a 'torus', so someone with 3 forms can go between any of them at will.
I think you're going to need to go at least 5D for this to work without him having to intersect the 3D universe in two pla-
...no, wait, the slice that intersects with the 3D universe can do so on a tangent. This means that he always "sticks out" in the same direction, unlike the carrot-type vampire, who "sticks out" to the one side as a human and to the other side as a bat.
Going back to the 4D anti-vampire corridor, if you take out one of the two 4D walls (making your selection carefully), you can still keep the Torus Shifter out while allowing vampires or werewolves in (but only in one of their two forms).
Sure, he'll have a robe surrounding him when he's next feeling batty, but it's not going to make him look ridiculous for the rest of his life.
Worse, it's stuck halfway along the transformation! Next time he changes to a bat, he can cut off more parts of the robe, but he still feels an odd tightness somewhere (he can't quite figure out where) and, every time he shifts, he's encases in the tattered remains of a robe sleeve out of nowhere for a moment mid-transform.
And if that's not bad enough, every time that gargoyle sees him, the stupid gargoyle starts laughing! What on earth does he find so funny?
(I imagine this being eventually sorted out when the gargoyle steps up to the vampire, reaches out, his hand vanishes, there's an odd little tug in an indescribable place, and then the gargoyle's hand reappears, holding the ragged remnants of the sleeve.)
Somewhat, but 10^13 is huge. I should ask my 4D expert for whether the momentum would be "huge" or "negligable" which I'm sure it's going to wind up being one or the other.
Nano is, what 10^-9? And let's say ten seconds for the transformation, and a 1nm transform thickness. Then you're talking 0.1nm/s velocity, thus [ 10^13 * 10^-10 ] or a momentum difference by a factor of 10^3 or around 1000.
...okay, so it still works out to a huge difference. (But by juggling 4D thickness and transformation time, you can pretty much set that momentum to any value you want; put the 4D thickness in femtometers and you'll have a shapeshifting momentum that's horrible tiny)
He doesn't have to protect his girlfriend - he just wants to.
Fair enough. If his preprogrammed rules just say "No harm may come to the Master" then he can still attack at any time, as long as he doesn't actually cause any harm - deliberate or not.
And yes, that justification works.
I don't know if you're familiar with a webcomic called Freefall? There are a number of characters (including robots and at least one genetically engineered wolf) who are constrained by Asimov's three laws. At one point, said wolf saw a human threaten a non-human friend of hers with a knife (a rubber knife, but she didn't know that) and promptly restrained the attacker because "running with knives is dangerous, you could do yourself an injury".
(At another point, she asks "I'm supposed to save any human in imminent danger of death, right? No matter how they got there? So... is it normal for me to fantasise about breaking into Death Row and freeing all the prisoners there?")
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
the trousers might vanish gradually, the belt going immediately and the legs sort of peeling away from out 3D universe as the shape changes further - stop at the right moment, and you have a pair of cloth anklets that look like they're just hovering
That's really cool, I'm trying to picture it - the monster is undulating, changing around, parts appearing and disappearing and his pants are amongst them.
Hmmmm. Wouldn't that depend on the vampire? I can imagine a juvenile vampire who's decided that flying is the best thing ever spending a lot of time as a bat
Ah, my headcanon is that vampires can't turn into bats until they're more than 1000 years old, at which point they're too dignified to go joyflying - though I'm sure there are plenty such vampires that live as a bat to hide, or simply because they enjoy it, or whathaveyou, and would have the appropriate human-ish clothing.
A gargoyle might though, preferring clothing that is tight and stretchy; kind of like the Hulk's magic pants.
I don't think 'stretchy' will help much. The moment it's tight enough to need to stretch, he'll be dragging it into the fourth dimension.
Yeah. Hmmm. I wonder what you'd need to fabricate in order to have pants that keep you modest. I doubt a 5,000 year old gargoyle cares much who sees his dingus though, so he's unlikely to go to trouble.
the slice [of a torus being] that intersects with the 3D universe can do so on a tangent. This means that he always "sticks out" in the same direction, unlike the carrot-type vampire, who "sticks out" to the one side as a human and to the other side as a bat.
Going back to the 4D anti-vampire corridor, if you take out one of the two 4D walls (making your selection carefully), you can still keep the Torus Shifter out while allowing vampires or werewolves in (but only in one of their two forms).
Thanks for the input about the torus; you're right. Probably a lot to worry about. I'm feeling wary of using the 4D world too much as it requires a lot of thought and trouble, but hey, it also provides a lot of cool plot points.
Worse, [the vampire's Robe is] stuck halfway along the transformation! Next time he changes to a bat, he can cut off more parts of the robe, but he still feels an odd tightness somewhere (he can't quite figure out where) and, every time he shifts, he's encases in the tattered remains of a robe sleeve out of nowhere for a moment mid-transform.
And if that's not bad enough, every time that gargoyle sees him, the stupid gargoyle starts laughing! What on earth does he find so funny?
YES
(I imagine this being eventually sorted out when the gargoyle steps up to the vampire, reaches out, his hand vanishes, there's an odd little tug in an indescribable place, and then the gargoyle's hand reappears, holding the ragged remnants of the sleeve.)
I'm imagining the gargoyle's hand would not need to vanish for this to happen. If you were interacting with a flatlander in a similar situation using your left index finger as your avatar, you could use your right hand to pick the piece of flatlander fabric off their projection in 3D space, and then throw it onto Flatland in front of your finger, say. So the gargoyle could use one of his other projections (e.g. the 'cross-section' that's 'parallel' to the sleeved-bat) to grab the sleeve, and pass it 'down' the conga line of his projections into the 3D universe, which would result in the vampire feeling the odd tug, and a piece of torn fabric appearing out of thin air bit by bit.
I don't know if you're familiar with a webcomic called Freefall? There are a number of characters (including robots and at least one genetically engineered wolf) who are constrained by Asimov's three laws. At one point, said wolf saw a human threaten a non-human friend of hers with a knife (a rubber knife, but she didn't know that) and promptly restrained the attacker because "running with knives is dangerous, you could do yourself an injury".
That sounds really cool - I should check it out. It's been a long time since I've read a new webcomic.
Also, we have a new character concept now: you know eldritch horrors, how they're meant to be indescribable and make you go mad? They're clearly a 4D creature with a lot of forms that just doesn't stay still, the same way that if we stuck our finger in flatland we would have a really hard time holding it level and our finger would seem to change texture and size quite unnervingly to a native flatlander.
So the gargoyle's long-lost wife is such a creature, going looking for her husband. She has thousands or millions of forms with no, or very very thin, intermediate slices, including many of the biblical "angel" forms that are quite terrifying (one is apparently a wheel of eyes?), relatively normal creatures, human forms, demon forms, inanimate objects, etc. But none of it has any structure because she's moving between them too quickly to tell.
You can see the sort of things that would happen:
"Oh my god what the hell is that thing"
"I'm sorry, I forget your people can only see a fraction of my true form. Let me hold still."
(her form stops undulating and she becomes a perfectly normal looking box of petunias)
"How's this?"
"Much better, thankyou. I don't think I want to know how you can talk in that form."
"Oh, it's not that hard when you - excuse me a moment, sorry, I have a cramp."
(the box of petunias undulates, and is almost immediately replaced with a huge raven-like bird with eyes of fire)
"Ahhh. Much better. Now, have you seen my husband around here anywhere?"
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
That's really cool, I'm trying to picture it - the monster is undulating, changing around, parts appearing and disappearing and his pants are amongst them.
Thinking about it, if he's only pulling the belted part of his pants a few nanometres away from our normal 3D universe, then most of the legs are going to stay there anywhere, surely?
Ah, my headcanon is that vampires can't turn into bats until they're more than 1000 years old,
Oh. Yeah, that does reduce the odds of going joyflying. Not necessarily because they're too dignified (you get some very undignified eighty-year-olds), but because they're far more set in their ways and trying to be careful not to be caught out by a surprise dawn.
Yeah. Hmmm. I wonder what you'd need to fabricate in order to have pants that keep you modest. I doubt a 5,000 year old gargoyle cares much who sees his dingus though, so he's unlikely to go to trouble.
Hmmm. The first thought I have is a "bedsheet ghost" type costume.
Refining that slightly, I thought of a poncho - too big on his human form, barely modest on his gargoyle form.
Then I thought some kind of robe, with straps and belts, which takes several minutes to put on in his human form - but pull the right cord, and it unfolds almost instantly into a gargoyle-sized poncho.
Certainly a challenge for any clothing designer, but perhaps not entirely insurmountable.
I doubt a 5,000 year old gargoyle cares much who sees his dingus though, so he's unlikely to go to trouble.
Fair enough. (Or perhaps it's just for formal occasions).
So the gargoyle could use one of his other projections (e.g. the 'cross-section' that's 'parallel' to the sleeved-bat) to grab the sleeve, and pass it 'down' the conga line of his projections into the 3D universe, which would result in the vampire feeling the odd tug, and a piece of torn fabric appearing out of thin air bit by bit.
It's not a conga line. It's the same hand, it's just a lot more complex in shape than a human hand. But you're right, he doesn't need to take the visible part of his hand out of the universe to reach the fabric. (He might need to in order to move it 'around' the vampire's human shape to get at the fabric... or he might not).
That sounds really cool - I should check it out. It's been a long time since I've read a new webcomic.
Starts here. The scene with the rubber knife comes in about 1500 strips later, and really needs a bit of context.
Also, we have a new character concept now
Hmmm. A simple 4D multishifter would be a string - would need to always take the shapes in the same order (geraniums come between whale and giant eagle with glowing eyes).
So I think she'd work better as a complex multishifter. Something with a lot of moving parts that shift and adjust - and because they do so in four dimensions, she can change her mass as well. Perhaps even a cloud of near-molecular nanomachines that hold firmly to each other but can flow like a liquid - including in the 4D directions - and change colour. (She might even be the origin of a lot of mythology). Designed to be able to look like anything - perhaps originally intended as a perfect spy or something...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
if he's only pulling the belted part of his pants a few nanometres away from our normal 3D universe, then most of the legs are going to stay there anywhere, surely?
Probably... I assume he'd pick clothing that doesn't stay 'stuck' on his gargoyle form in the way described above, because e.g. the rim of his pant leg could catch on something when he's flying.
Refining that slightly, I thought of a poncho - too big on his human form, barely modest on his gargoyle form.
The gargoyle's son has been known to wear ridiculous outfits to hide his own wings and bat ears, notably including an 80s businesswoman style suit with padded shoulders and a top hat, a Queen's Guard uniform, and yes, a poncho and sombrero so a poncho sounds excellent.
Then I thought some kind of robe, with straps and belts, which takes several minutes to put on in his human form - but pull the right cord, and it unfolds almost instantly into a gargoyle-sized poncho.
Going further, he probably has some sort of "formal outfit" that is produced by designers in the Demon World (who are likely 4D creatures themselves) that, when put on his 4D form, makes each of his cross-sections look like it's in a tuxedo, say. These would be rare and expensive and only for formal occaisions because can you imagine the dry cleaning bills, especially when you're around blood????
It's the same hand, it's just a lot more complex in shape than a human hand.
Is it really? If we use the "finger in flatland" example, each cross section of my finger is part of the same finger, but, say, the ridges in my fingerprint in one cross section are different ridges to the ridges further down, even though they're part of the same part of my 3D body and perform the same function.
So I think she'd work better as a complex multishifter.
Thanks for that - not limiting her to a "spoke" 4D creature is an interesting idea. I even like the idea of letting her be at oblique angles. Can you imagine a human, but at a slight 4D angle, so the proportions seem off somehow, but you can't quite put your finger on it? Or a human who is on such a severe 4D angle that they're barely recognisable as a human and seem to have, say, a huge gash showing the inside of their neck.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
Probably... I assume he'd pick clothing that doesn't stay 'stuck' on his gargoyle form in the way described above, because e.g. the rim of his pant leg could catch on something when he's flying.
So things that would be tight on gargoyle form. (That's probably most clothing).
These would be rare and expensive and only for formal occaisions because can you imagine the dry cleaning bills, especially when you're around blood????
Not only that, your dry cleaner needs to be able to handle four dimensions as well (so that they can handle that stain sitting just outside the 3D universe). Which implies that either he does his own dry-cleaning, or (more likely) there is exactly one native 4D drycleaner in the Demon World, who charges whatever he wants because he has absolutely no competition.
It's the same hand, it's just a lot more complex in shape than a human hand.
Is it really?
...is this really anything more than semantics?
When I poke my finger into Flatland, the Flatland natives see only a slice of it. They call that slice my finger, but it is not - it is a slice of my finger.
When we see the gargoyle's hand, we're only seeing a slice of the real thing, which we call his hand. Whether he calls the whole 4D organ a 'hand' or a - I don't know - 'meta-hand' or something else, it's still the same thing.
I even like the idea of letting her be at oblique angles. Can you imagine a human, but at a slight 4D angle, so the proportions seem off somehow, but you can't quite put your finger on it?
...yes, I can. You can check up on the math with your resident expert; but the result should be (assuming she remains "flat", just at a constant angle) a human shape which is stretched out in some arbitrary direction.
Let's say, for sake of example, that she's stretched out vertically. You can find her new height with the good old Pythagorean theorem; her untilted height (let's say two metres) is one of the legs of the triangle, the distance that the head that should correspond with {the feet that are in the 3D universe} is from the 3D universe is the other leg of the triangle (um... a few nanometres). Take the squares of both of these, add them together, and take the square root to find her stretched height...
I am seeing a distinct disadvantage here to having the shifters all only a few nanometres thick. The height distortion caused be her not being flat on the 3D universe seems to be limited to "too small to see".
(The shape distortion, on the other hand - if her feet are "black female" and her head is "white male", then the body between will presumably gradually fade from the one to the other, getting slowly paler with height. With a very little amount of effort, she can presumably use this to mix-and-match parts from various shapes, so you could get a human with half a phoenix wing (disconnected, several centimetres from her back) and three-quarters of a lion's leg or something like that quite easily)
I thought up a (brief) scene while thinking about this character...
"How small can you get?"
"Um, give me a moment..." shrinks down to a single eyeball, which drops to the ground "How's that?"
"Great! Now -"
"Just a moment, I can't keep my balance like this. Here -" three more disconnected eyeballs appear, the four forming the points of a tetrahedron a metre on each side "- much better."
"Um. I was going to try to hide you in my pocket, but I don't have pockets that far apart..."
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
So [he'd wear] things that would be tight on gargoyle form. (That's probably most clothing).
Probably. I wonder how thick his arms/legs/etc would be?
Which implies that either he does his own dry-cleaning, or (more likely) there is exactly one native 4D drycleaner in the Demon World, who charges whatever he wants because he has absolutely no competition.
Back in the day, his 4D spouse (wife for a 4D undulating creature is a bit too... precise for my taste) probably did it. Now, he probably makes trips every few dozen years to get his clothing dry cleaned, ironed, pressed and maybe to get a new piece or two made up. For the most part he just makes do with a variety of human clothing, since it's infinitely cheaper and more disposable.
It's the same hand, it's just a lot more complex in shape than a human hand.
Is it really?
...is this really anything more than semantics?
Not really.
When I poke my finger into Flatland, the Flatland natives see only a slice of it. They call that slice my finger, but it is not - it is a slice of my finger.
Yes, but to risk pushing the analogy until breaks, if you are using the valleys between the ridges of your fingerprint to grab things in flatland, if you push your finger an inch up, although they are still fingerprint ridges, they are probably different ridges than the ridges that were being used as flatland graspers.
When we see the gargoyle's hand, we're only seeing a slice of the real thing, which we call his hand. Whether he calls the whole 4D organ a 'hand' or a - I don't know - 'meta-hand' or something else, it's still the same thing.
Yeah OK, we're probably on the same page then more or less; only his 3D hands could all be parts of multiple different meta-hands and so one could act without impacting on another.
I am seeing a distinct disadvantage here to having the shifters all only a few nanometres thick. The height distortion caused be her not being flat on the 3D universe seems to be limited to "too small to see".
Yeah - Rule of Cool might require that the ones we want to try these sorts of shenanigans with be longer. Makes sense for Hyper Shifter With Lots Of Forms, since those forms take up space.
With a very little amount of effort, she can presumably use this to mix-and-match parts from various shapes, so you could get a human with half a phoenix wing (disconnected, several centimetres from her back) and three-quarters of a lion's leg or something like that quite easily)
Sounds cool.
[eyeball scene]
Very good! I love thinking of what words 4D beings would use to describe feelings that they have in 4D, and the concept of 'balance' being used in this way is neat.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
Probably. I wonder how thick his arms/legs/etc would be?
I'm thinking thicker than as a human, or he's going to be a stick-figure gargoyle.
Back in the day, his 4D spouse (wife for a 4D undulating creature is a bit too... precise for my taste) probably did it. Now, he probably makes trips every few dozen years to get his clothing dry cleaned, ironed, pressed and maybe to get a new piece or two made up. For the most part he just makes do with a variety of human clothing, since it's infinitely cheaper and more disposable.
This seems very sensible.
Yes, but to risk pushing the analogy until breaks, if you are using the valleys between the ridges of your fingerprint to grab things in flatland, if you push your finger an inch up, although they are still fingerprint ridges, they are probably different ridges than the ridges that were being used as flatland graspers.
Different ridges, but (to take this to something that's not just semantics) can I move those ridges without moving the ridges that intersect with the 3D world?
Yeah OK, we're probably on the same page then more or less; only his 3D hands could all be parts of multiple different meta-hands and so one could act without impacting on another.
I guess this is really a matter of how he's put together. It makes sense to me that, if he moves his hand outside the normal 3D universe, then his hand in the normal 3D universe will also move at least slightly - in the same way as the tendons in your wrist move when you wriggle your fingers.
Doesn't mean that the hand in the normal 3D universe is doing the same thing as the hand a little off to the side is (but that could be handy, since you can then describe what he's doing that can be seen in a way that allows an alert and knowledgeable reader to work out what he's doing that can't be seen, e.g. when writing from the perspective of someone else).
Yeah - Rule of Cool might require that the ones we want to try these sorts of shenanigans with be longer. Makes sense for Hyper Shifter With Lots Of Forms, since those forms take up space.
Due to 4D momentum, this means it's also a good deal harder to stop her from shifting, then.
Very good! I love thinking of what words 4D beings would use to describe feelings that they have in 4D, and the concept of 'balance' being used in this way is neat.
I imagined the "single eyeball" shape to be about as stable as balancing on your toe. (And for pretty much the same reason).
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
So, I had another thought: the fact a gargoyle is 4D and therefore has x-ray vision beyond even what I think superman can hope for is kind of overpowered.
For example, we're starting the scene where the gargoyle and his friend stumble across the Main Vampire's coffin containing his vombie double while searching through his giant hoard of crap for a macguffin. The problem is, the gargoyle should be able to see the vombie in the coffin that looks just like his master just as clearly as we can see anything on a piece of paper.
The obvious way to limit this would be to say that he's got a limited range and acuity with his 4D vision in the 3D world. After all, if you open the average paperback at your feet you can see the pages but you can't really make out the text. So giving his x-ray vision a practical radius of a few metres, and an absolute radius of maybe 10 metres before it's all too fuzzy, seems like a good workaround. But does it make sense? Something to ponder.
And, how does a creature the weight of a giraffe fly, and also be able to carry a few hundred kilos in payload? He has big wings, but I doubt they're big enough. Can we just say it's magic, or is there a 4D reason it could work? Had a brief discussion with my husband about it last night but it didn't go anywhere.
Different ridges, but (to take this to something that's not just semantics) can I move those ridges without moving the ridges that intersect with the 3D world?
Depends on how your finger is constructed - so, basically, whatever the plot would prefer I suppose.
If he moves his hand outside the normal 3D universe, then his hand in the normal 3D universe will also move at least slightly - in the same way as the tendons in your wrist move when you wriggle your fingers.
Hmmmmm. Good point. He probably also has some sort of biology, especially since, you know, he had a kid.
Doesn't mean that the hand in the normal 3D universe is doing the same thing as the hand a little off to the side is (but that could be handy, since you can then describe what he's doing that can be seen in a way that allows an alert and knowledgeable reader to work out what he's doing that can't be seen, e.g. when writing from the perspective of someone else).
Another good point - it would probably serve the story to have him do it, whether it's a geometric requirement or simply because he feels more comfortable mirroring his 4D movements in 3D - perhaps because he thinks it's polite, for example.
I imagined the "single eyeball" shape to be about as stable as balancing on your toe. (And for pretty much the same reason).
Yeah, plus, the idea of hiding in a pocket is a bit silly to a 4D shifter. I mean, sure, she can see how it works on an intellectual level, but she is CLEARLY right there, she can't believe people really fall for this!
Some drabble from the MacGuffin Quest, should it interest you: *William has a very important letter to write. When he has to write these important letters, he’ll seal himself off for up to a week and end up producing a handwritten document the size of War and Peace, written on vellum, naturally, complete with decorations in the margins. The reason was mentioned only briefly - it sounded as though a pair of rare birds he gifted the Marquess Conyngham a hundred years earlier produced only sterile offspring - but it was an infraction that was apparently worthy of such a letter, and so it was. This happened every year or two, and could not be rushed.* *In the meantime, Red and the gargoyle had been tasked with searching William's extremely large storage room - it is about the size of a football field - for an appropriate gift to accompany the letter.*
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
The problem is, the gargoyle should be able to see the vombie in the coffin that looks just like his master just as clearly as we can see anything on a piece of paper.
Yeah, he can see it. So? Doesn't mean he knows what's up. (Yes, it looks like his Master, but his Master's over there writing a letter - quite visible despite the walls and so on in the way - so something fishy is going on. Perhaps this other vampire is a threat to his Master and needs to be dealt with in some way? It should be more closely investigated, perhaps...)
Or maybe he does know what's up. And it's clear, it's obvious. He doesn't bother to point it out to Red because, hey, it's right there, it's clearly visible. And while he's busy trying to put a pile of stuff back into a completely different closet on the far end of the room, Red opens the Vombie coffin, and a hungry Vombie instantly bursts out...
The obvious way to limit this would be to say that he's got a limited range and acuity with his 4D vision in the 3D world.
I'd suggest making it some kind of active radar instead of passive vision. That is, there are no photons outside 3D space - in order to see anything, then, he has to 'ping' in the required direction with some sort of 4D radar. Normally, he's doing this all the time, just in case (but he can turn it off if he wants). This has a few consequences:
- There will be a limited range. (You can pretty much set this where you want). This range can be extended with a brighter 'ping'.
- Anything else that's pinging in 4D space is visible even when he's not pinging, and it's visible at at least twice the normal range (since the 'ping' only has to travel in one direction). Thus, one gargoyle staying silent can easily stay out of radar range of a gargoyle who's continually pinging (but the silent one is going to be unable to see anything else 4D)
- He can't see outside the normal universe in colour. (He may be able to see in texture). So, if he picks up something interesting or unexpected, he might still want to bring his eyes to bear to get an idea of what it actually looks like in colour.
- Things inside normal 3D space just look like part of the same infinite flat sheet to his 4D sight. So he can't tell you what's inside the next room without opening the door, unless something in there is 4D.
And, how does a creature the weight of a giraffe fly, and also be able to carry a few hundred kilos in payload? He has big wings, but I doubt they're big enough. Can we just say it's magic, or is there a 4D reason it could work? Had a brief discussion with my husband about it last night but it didn't go anywhere.
Huh. The first thing I can think of is stilts. Have his human form standing on stilts, mostly outside the normal 3D world except a little twist at the bottom... that seems a touch silly, though, and limits him in height.
I'd rather go with sufficiently advanced Atlantean technology; he doesn't know it himself (due perhaps to the memory wipe), but he has built-in anti-gravity generators which automatically switch on when he flaps his wings.
Another good point - it would probably serve the story to have him do it, whether it's a geometric requirement or simply because he feels more comfortable mirroring his 4D movements in 3D - perhaps because he thinks it's polite, for example.
It's important to be sure which is which - if it's just polite, then he can drop it in an emergency (which is probably when you most want to show the reader what he is actually doing). So I'd probably go with geometric requirement, myself. But either could work.
Yeah, plus, the idea of hiding in a pocket is a bit silly to a 4D shifter. I mean, sure, she can see how it works on an intellectual level, but she is CLEARLY right there, she can't believe people really fall for this!
Yes, but, importantly, people do keep falling for it. And, well, if it's ridiculous but it works...
Of course, the needs of balance mean that she's still four eyeballs in a rough tetrahedron. With three allies moving in more-or-less unison, the three lower ones can hide in three pockets (it doesn't matter if one of them moves a few centimetres back or forth, but if he gets left behind he'll get dragged by his pocket) while the upper eyeball is floating well above most people's line of sight (where they can see it if they just look up, but most people don't just look up... also, they can hide the upper eyeball by disguising it as a helium balloon...)
[excerpt]
I am definitely seeing the possibility of Red opening the vombie coffin while the gargoyle is busy trying to repack something on the other side of the room.
And then getting a lecture (once the dust has settled) about Not Opening Vombie Coffins.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Or maybe he does know what's up. And it's clear, it's obvious.
After all, what self-respecting old vampire doesn't have a vombie in reserve? Surely William told Red (his baby vampire protege) about this?
And while he's busy trying to put a pile of stuff back into a completely different closet on the far end of the room, Red opens the Vombie coffin, and a hungry Vombie instantly bursts out...
We're in /r/rational so I'm a bit loath to suggest a vampire would have put a vombie in a coffin without a stake through the heart to immobilise it - it seems to be prudent and with no downside, though I guess wanting to have a fascimile of yourself at short notice means that de-staking might be too time consuming in an emergency??
I'd suggest making it some kind of active radar instead of passive vision.
Yes. Fits as well thematically: a gargoyle looks like a bat, after all.
- Things inside normal 3D space just look like part of the same infinite flat sheet to his 4D sight. So he can't tell you what's inside the next room without opening the door, unless something in there is 4D.
I don't understand what you mean like this. Are you saying he can't see through walls?
And, how does a creature the weight of a giraffe fly
I'd rather go with sufficiently advanced Atlantean technology
Yep, because I'm sure there's all manner of other creatures in mythology that fly, many of which that probably don't have wings at all. Better not to limit oneself when it comes to ordinary fantasy abilities.
It's important to be sure which is which - if it's just polite, then he can drop it in an emergency (which is probably when you most want to show the reader what he is actually doing). So I'd probably go with geometric requirement, myself. But either could work.
We'll see if it ever comes up. I'm beginning to get quite enthusiastic about trying to write this up for amazon self publishing, but in reality it'd probably be a slightly better Twilight; occult romance. However it's all GLBT/feminist as far as themes go, so maybe it's not so derivative...
[eyeball hiding]
I can see it now; three guys dressed as clowns, with a huge bunch of balloons. Maybe not as stealthy as they'd have hoped though...
[excerpt]
I am definitely seeing the possibility of Red opening the vombie coffin while the gargoyle is busy trying to repack something on the other side of the room.
And then getting a lecture (once the dust has settled) about Not Opening Vombie Coffins.
Yep. Containing the Vombie would be so annoying for William, who had to stop writing one of his pages, and he has to start it all over again because the person he offended would be able to tell he didn't do the whole page in a single masterful stroke, and now, that won't do, will it?
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
After all, what self-respecting old vampire doesn't have a vombie in reserve? Surely William told Red (his baby vampire protege) about this?
Makes sense to me.
We're in /r/rational so I'm a bit loath to suggest a vampire would have put a vombie in a coffin without a stake through the heart to immobilise it
I didn't think of that, but you're right, it would be a logical precaution. So Red'll just open this box and there's William lying there with a stake through his heart.
Yep. Containing the Vombie would be so annoying for William, who had to stop writing one of his pages, and he has to start it all over again because the person he offended would be able to tell he didn't do the whole page in a single masterful stroke, and now, that won't do, will it?
It really shouldn't have to be. I mean, the gargoyle's right there, right? And he's not much of a vampire's bodyguard if he can't handle just one rogue vombie on his own. (It's not like vombies are at all intelligent about how they do things, after all).
I don't understand what you mean like this. Are you saying he can't see through walls?
Let's say that he closes his eyes, covers his ears, and so on and so forth; that he is, for a while, perceiving the universe only via his 4D radar.
The universe looks like a flat sheet. A perfectly flat sheet, with hardly a bump on it to stand out. There are, in fact, three bumps in the area; these being William, William's vombie, and Red - all being vampires, and thus 4D beings, lets them stand out a bit from the flat 3D universe around them. He can see their 4D shapes clearly, no matter what walls may lie between them.
But now consider a number of closed boxes, in the storeroom. This box contains a number of books.
To the gargoyle's 4D radar, the contents look flat and shiny.
This box contains a supply of vintage playing cards.
To the gargoyle's 4D radar, the contents look flat and shiny.
That box contains a selection of antique cuckoo clocks.
To the gargoyle's 4D radar, the contents look flat and shiny.
The box way over there contains a multitude of brightly coloured scarves.
To the gargoyle's 4D radar, the contents look flat and shiny.
...you see what I'm getting at? He can see around ordinary 3D walls, but ordinary 3D objects all look the same - flat and shiny - to his 4D radar. Until he actually opens the box, he can't tell whether it contains books or bricks.
We'll see if it ever comes up.
Okie dokie lokie.
I can see it now; three guys dressed as clowns, with a huge bunch of balloons. Maybe not as stealthy as they'd have hoped though...
Yeah, they're going to stand out a bit. The occasional whisper of "Don't drift apart so much!" from somewhere in their midst is only going to make it more difficult.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
He's not much of a vampire's bodyguard if he can't handle just one rogue vombie on his own.
Absolutely.
I don't understand what you mean like this. Are you saying he can't see through walls?
...you see what I'm getting at? He can see around ordinary 3D walls, but ordinary 3D objects all look the same - flat and shiny - to his 4D radar.
Hmmmmmm. Not really. I can see that he wouldn't see colours, so he could see a book, but he can't see the title unless it's raised/embossed. Where my gap of knowledge starts is: I can read everything that's on a piece of paper, so why can't a 4D creature "read" everything that's on a "3D plane" within his eye range? It's because there's no photons that go from the 3D world to the 4D world, isn't it? Photons definitely don't travel into the 4D world or physics crumbles under the inverse cube law. (Also a reason that Atlantis couldn't be a 4D world and our world is a 3D offshoot universe - physics as we know it just won't work in 4D)
Had another unproductive conversation with my husband about how 4D eyes would see the 3D world, and has resulted in him convincing me that the 'terrible technobabble' explanation of 4D creatures causing one of the 9 dimensions from string theory to 'uncurl' a bit is apparently not only super plausible but super elegant, and could be used to explain magic (he said that if you could change the 9D geometry you could do pretty much any magic you wanted, making light appear, moving things, transformations, etc). He said it was something to do with Kurosaki-yao shapes (just googled it - turns out it's this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calabi%E2%80%93Yau_manifold - I do not understand a word of the article so I have to take his word for it.)
I think what my husband was saying is these Calabi-Yau manifolds mean you can have photons stick around to hit the 4D eyes, with some very localised physics breaking (which can also be used to cast spells), and you get the x-ray vision.
It's kind of annoying that x-ray vision is so tricky when to a "layman" like myself (i.e. someone with moderate experience with the implications of a 4D parallel world) the x-ray vision is something that should obviously be there. My co-author/roleplay partner has little tertiary mathematics expertise (she's a biologist) so she's in the "true layman" camp and just thinks all the random consequences of the phyiscs are really neat.
I think I'm going to have to nut this out with him and maybe see if I can get him to help me write something canonical about how it all works as I've reached the very limits of my ability to comprehend. It's great that what is going to be essentially GLBTwilight will have lore based in string theory though, so that's something.
I can see it now; three guys dressed as clowns, with a huge bunch of balloons. Maybe not as stealthy as they'd have hoped though...
Yeah, they're going to stand out a bit. The occasional whisper of "Don't drift apart so much!" from somewhere in their midst is only going to make it more difficult.
Yes, but the image of clowns is just
goldhorrifying.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
Hmmmmmm. Not really. I can see that he wouldn't see colours, so he could see a book, but he can't see the title unless it's raised/embossed.
This is pretty much what I'm getting at, with the added conditional that it would need to be raised/embossed in the fourth dimension, which by definition a 3D object isn't.
I'm not saying his 4D radar has to work this way. It can work in ways that allow him to pick up the shape of 3D objects. I'm saying that it can work this way, and this neutralises a lot of the advantages. In short, I'm trying to suggest a way in which it can work, without giving free X-ray vision as a consequence.
(Photons have nothing to do with it. His 4D radar works entirely without photons; this it pretty much has to do).
[uncurling a fourth dimension]
I don't know much about Calabi-Yau manifolds either. But one potential niggle strikes at me - if a 4D creature is locally untwisting one of these extra dimensions, then surely the following consequences follow:
- Any magic dependant on this is limited in range to the area of the untwisted space
- The gargoyle's 4D radar will not be able to see through an area that's not untwisted
- As a consequence of the above, the 4D radar can only see another 4D being if they're close enough that their untwisted region overlaps the gargoyle's untwisted region, at which point they're both in range to throw untwist-dependant magic at each other.
I think what my husband was saying is these Calabi-Yau manifolds mean you can have photons stick around to hit the 4D eyes, with some very localised physics breaking (which can also be used to cast spells), and you get the x-ray vision.
That looks reasonable, if the 4D radar does end up using photons after all.
Yes, but the image of clowns is just
goldhorrifying.Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along. Nothing to see here.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
I'm saying that [4D vision] can work this way, and this neutralises a lot of the advantages. In short, I'm trying to suggest a way in which it can work, without giving free X-ray vision as a consequence.
Yeah... I think the problem is I want X-Ray vision. Being a gargoyle whose only wish in life is to protect whoever his master is at the time, as well as have a family every few hundred years does not put him in a very powerful position, plot-wise, if that makes sense. The tension is mostly from the vampire hunters vs his master (William), and the head vampire hunter has become a secret jannisary (of William) after a bungled sting operation, which means she's kind of sort of but not really delaying the capturing of the vampire even though they know a LOT about him, ultimately resulting in her taking big risks with a different vampire and getting another character (Red, William's former thrall) killed by a third vampire as a result and thus ultimately turned into a vampire himself. (Not complicated at all, is it?)
I don't know much about Calabi-Yau manifolds either. But one potential niggle strikes at me - if a 4D creature is locally untwisting one of these extra dimensions, then surely the following consequences follow:
- Any magic [or 4D radar] dependant on this is limited in range to the area of the untwisted space
My understanding is that the magic itself can untwist it. So, for example, if you're shooting a magic missile at someone 10m away, the spell uncurls your local space to have a projectile/force/etc in it, and then the spell also causes the missile to push itself forward until it hits real matter, maybe kind of sort of like a glider in the game of life? Similarly, the 4D radar could untwist locally.
- As a consequence of the above, the 4D radar can only see another 4D being if they're close enough that their untwisted region overlaps the gargoyle's untwisted region, at which point they're both in range to throw untwist-dependant magic at each other.
Yes, this was one of the issues my husband raised (4D creatures can only see each other 'in range'), which is why I told him I didn't like the idea at first. I think there's a workaround, though, that has everything working.
Yes, but the image of clowns is just
goldhorrifying.Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along. Nothing to see here.
The world is full of mysteries........ I wonder what is there, lurking beneath the surface ?
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
Yeah... I think the problem is I want X-Ray vision.
Ooooooh. Right. Never mind, then. I misunderstood something at some point.
Being a gargoyle whose only wish in life is to protect whoever his master is at the time, as well as have a family every few hundred years does not put him in a very powerful position, plot-wise, if that makes sense.
Eh, you can wring quite a lot of plot out of that, if he has main-character focus. For example, consider; he has to prevent harm to William. Does this include emotional harm? If so, is he required to extend a (lesser) degree of protection to William's friends, allies, and protege? And how do his internal subroutines identify William - is he constrained to prevent all harm that would be done to William's vombie?
(Not complicated at all, is it?)
Not really, no. Though I presume it isn't laid out quite so straightforwardly in the finished work.
My understanding is that the magic itself can untwist it. So, for example, if you're shooting a magic missile at someone 10m away, the spell uncurls your local space to have a projectile/force/etc in it, and then the spell also causes the missile to push itself forward until it hits real matter, maybe kind of sort of like a glider in the game of life? Similarly, the 4D radar could untwist locally.
Okay, that makes sense. But it means that every time the gargoyle pings, there's going to be a fairly large area untwisting around him. That's starting to make the ping look somewhat energy intensive, especially if he's keeping it up most of the time.
Yes, this was one of the issues my husband raised (4D creatures can only see each other 'in range'), which is why I told him I didn't like the idea at first. I think there's a workaround, though, that has everything working.
Instead of the radar (or maybe along with the radar) how about some sense (presumably never fully explained) that allows him to pick up nearby untwistings? This also resolves the energy-intensive untwisting radar to some degree, because he can then use it only when he's deliberately looking at (or for) something.
The world is full of mysteries........ I wonder what is there, lurking beneath the surface ?
There could be all sorts of things, hiding below the surface, avoiding notice, disguised as those you thought you knew... or maybe someone's been lying about their history... how would you ever know?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Yeah... I think the problem is I want X-Ray vision.
I misunderstood something at some point.
Yeah, I think the source was because I wanted to nerf the X-Ray vision so he doesn't have, like, complete vision of everything in the universe. Having it at low bandwith is a pretty good workaround.
Eh, you can wring quite a lot of plot out of that, if he has main-character focus. For example, consider; he has to prevent harm to William. Does this include emotional harm? If so, is he required to extend a (lesser) degree of protection to William's friends, allies, and protege? And how do his internal subroutines identify William - is he constrained to prevent all harm that would be done to William's vombie?
(Not complicated at all, is it?)
Not really, no. Though I presume it isn't laid out quite so straightforwardly in the finished work.
That's the problem, we have ambitions of novellising it at some point, if only so our parents/partners/etc can read it, but it's hard when taking into account narrative structure and whatnot. Like, we're happy to yadda-yadda over two characters bonding and falling in love and just going straight into the conflict, but in a "real" novel you can't really just say "THREE MONTHS LATER" and skip to the action. And there's so many characters and the narrative just jumps around them based on who is interesting at the time. We probably need to work out an overall story arc, lay it out, write what each character is doing at each point, and then maybe hire an editor or something to help us slot it all in the right places.
Okay, that makes sense. But it means that every time the gargoyle pings, there's going to be a fairly large area untwisting around him. That's starting to make the ping look somewhat energy intensive, especially if he's keeping it up most of the time.
I suppose it depends where the energy is coming from. After all, a wizard can shoot a bolt of force at a bad guy, which takes a lot of energy. The wizard might feel tired afterwards but the amount of energy in a force bolt is more than would be in the average person's gylcogen stores.
Glycogen: about 1500 kcal is stored in the muscles, a rifle has about 2,000 Joules of energy. This is a factor of 3000 in favour of glycogen. If we assume a force bolt is equivalent to the biggest caliber bullet on that chart, the glycogen stores are still bigger by a factor of 200.
Whether using muscle glycogen for spellcasting is actually reasonable, it's actually a large enough store of energy that the human body could pull it off. Wow!
(Of course it depends how 'easy' it is for magic to 'uncurl' the Calabi-Yau manifold stuff...)
Add in a 4D creature which has several orders of magnitude more mass than a human to store its 4D glycogen analogue and you really have no trouble with the energy requirements IMO, though I'd imagine he might only use his radar when he's actively moving or looking at things.
Yes, this was one of the issues my husband raised (4D creatures can only see each other 'in range'), which is why I told him I didn't like the idea at first. I think there's a workaround, though, that has everything working.
Instead of the radar (or maybe along with the radar) how about some sense (presumably never fully explained) that allows him to pick up nearby untwistings? This also resolves the energy-intensive untwisting radar to some degree, because he can then use it only when he's deliberately looking at (or for) something.
Yeah, he also had an idea that involved seeing reflected images. I pouted and asked why we couldn't just have ether that the 4D-photons travel through, but apparently that's anathema to the whole thing, so.....
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
Yeah, I think the source was because I wanted to nerf the X-Ray vision so he doesn't have, like, complete vision of everything in the universe. Having it at low bandwith is a pretty good workaround.
That was probably it, yes. Low vision and lack of colour works for it, yes.
Eh, you can wring quite a lot of plot out of that, if he has main-character focus. For example, consider; he has to prevent harm to William. Does this include emotional harm? If so, is he required to extend a (lesser) degree of protection to William's friends, allies, and protege? And how do his internal subroutines identify William - is he constrained to prevent all harm that would be done to William's vombie?
You quoted this part but said nothing - I don't know if you meant to say something and then missed it?
That's the problem, we have ambitions of novellising it at some point, if only so our parents/partners/etc can read it, but it's hard when taking into account narrative structure and whatnot.
Okay.
Ignore narrative structure, tell your story.
Make sure to follow the rule of "show, don't tell" as much as is reasonable. Never outright describe how the magic works - rather have a behind-the-scenes set of rules and just apply them as necessary.
Always remember that what's dead obvious to you is not dead obvious to the reader. Unless you mention something explicitly, you don't need to go to much effort to hide it.
in a "real" novel you can't really just say "THREE MONTHS LATER" and skip to the action.
Yes you can. I've seen novels that say "SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS LATER". (Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question", is a perfect, albeit extreme, example).
And yeah, hiring an editor is probably worth the trouble.
Have you considered writing this as a Nanowrimo novel?
I suppose it depends where the energy is coming from.
We'd previously discussed the idea that the gargoyle's stone form during the day might be in order to allow him to recharge from solar energy. A lot of the energy could come from there.
Glycogen: about 1500 kcal is stored in the muscles, a rifle has about 2,000 Joules of energy. This is a factor of 3000 in favour of glycogen. If we assume a force bolt is equivalent to the biggest caliber bullet on that chart, the glycogen stores are still bigger by a factor of 200.
Which means that is the wizard fires off 200 force bolts, he falls over dead. And even a single force bolt means he needs a good 7.5kcal meal to make up the difference.
(Of course it depends how 'easy' it is for magic to 'uncurl' the Calabi-Yau manifold stuff...)
Yeeeeeeah.... that's going to be tricky. I have absolutely no idea how much energy that would even theoretically take.
It's probably reasonable to make the amount of energy proportional to the area that gets uncurled, and the length of time it is uncurled for. So a mage who uncurls an entire tunnel, then fires a force bolt along it, will use a lot more energy than a mage who fires a force bolt that moves with a 'bubble' of uncurled space. (This implies a more skilled mage will get the same effect with less effort - also, the 'moving bubble' missile means the other guy can't fire a missile back up your tunnel).
Add in a 4D creature which has several orders of magnitude more mass than a human to store its 4D glycogen analogue and you really have no trouble with the energy requirements IMO, though I'd imagine he might only use his radar when he's actively moving or looking at things.
You have no problem with energy storage. You still need energy input. His sources are solar and food; if he's pinging often, then I imagine he'll need to eat a lot more than if he's pinging rarely.
though I'd imagine he might only use his radar when he's actively moving or looking at things.
That makes sense, but he does need to be able to sense unexpected nearby vampires, so some sort of untwist-detecting sense will be extremely useful.
I pouted and asked why we couldn't just have ether that the 4D-photons travel through, but apparently that's anathema to the whole thing, so.....
Ah. I'm guessing that's because the ether doesn't exist before the dimensions unwind, and actually creating enough matter to fill up that 4D space will take significantly more energy than even the gargoyle's 4D body can store. (The radar sense needs to be able to 'see' using some means that doesn't require matter - much like light doesn't require matter, so some sort of 4D light analogue).
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Eh, you can wring quite a lot of plot out of that, if he has main-character focus. For example, consider; he has to prevent harm to William. Does this include emotional harm? If so, is he required to extend a (lesser) degree of protection to William's friends, allies, and protege? And how do his internal subroutines identify William - is he constrained to prevent all harm that would be done to William's vombie?
Those are all interesting questions to toy with! Emotional harm: probably, but only extreme emotional harm, so he wouldn't be full of white lies (probably total unyielding honesty would be one of his requirements, anyway), so yes, he would have to protect William's allies if reasonable. He wouldn't be required to prevent harm to the vombie; or maybe he is by default, but he would have been given specific instructions to keep the vombie alive but not allow it to harm anyone William wouldn't want to harm.
He's also compelled to obey William's orders. Presumably some sort of Asimovian three laws type scenario is happening in the background, only he's sentient so has the ability to choose to prioritise the third law over a weak second law command, just like in Runaround. Of course, no explicit three laws type doctrine is actually there, just it's a good way of thinking about this.
(Sorry I forgot to reply to this section before btw!)
Ignore narrative structure, tell your story.
I worry about that. I don't enjoy reading our logs if we gloss over things that I consider would be necessary to include to establish later scenes - then again, I suppose that would come under "tell your story", since "ignore narrative structure" does not mean "throw everything to the wind and just do a highlight reel".
Added to that there's no "one story", things start and stop and run parallel to each other and it ends up looking kind of like Sense8 in that you have multiple narratives happening independently of each other but also sometimes dependently. Characters who are protaganists in some plots are antagonists in others (which is great for having a well-developed, rational antagonist). I suppose part of the process is to select a narrative to choose, stick to it, and then write subsequent narratives as new "books" rather than try to make The Lord of The Rings on the first try.
Make sure to follow the rule of "show, don't tell" as much as is reasonable. Never outright describe how the magic works - rather have a behind-the-scenes set of rules and just apply them as necessary.
This is something we're pretty bad at (why last night we did a whole, very explicit explanation of vombies - but the protegé asked and William was not going to lie about it - though this stuff can always happen off-screen if it doesn't directly help the narrative).
Always remember that what's dead obvious to you is not dead obvious to the reader. Unless you mention something explicitly, you don't need to go to much effort to hide it.
I have GMed enough RPGs that my advice to new GMs who are like "how do I put hints in my game" are "make it so obvious that you think you are treating them like children, and then make it still more obvious again. They'll still not get it". I will make sure to apply that logic to exposition, because I do enjoy the idea of having a complex, self-consistent, seemingly random system of transformation and magic that can in princple be "figured out".
in a "real" novel you can't really just say "THREE MONTHS LATER" and skip to the action.
Yes you can. I've seen novels that say "SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS LATER". (Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question", is a perfect, albeit extreme, example).
Point taken. I wonder how many time skips you can get away with? I suppose we'll see.
And yeah, hiring an editor is probably worth the trouble.
Or, the poor man's version: finding a community willing to help out. If only the story would be appropriate for /r/rational. Unfortunately the rational elements would be minor, so I'd probably be better off posting in another subreddit if I wanted feedback.
Have you considered writing this as a Nanowrimo novel?
Pretty much every year. Unfortunately November is a bad month for me, if Nanowrimo were January or February it might have already happened.
Which means that is the wizard fires off 200 force bolts, he falls over dead.
I don't think so, I think the body would start catabolising fat and muscle to create more glucose; then again, the glycogen in your heart or diaphragm muscles gets used up by the force bolts? Very bad. A talented magician would probably not allow it to get to this point.
Then again, the character with premonitions who sometimes gets nosebleeds that are related to them? Probably related to his complete lack of control over his magic.
(Of course it depends how 'easy' it is for magic to 'uncurl' the Calabi-Yau manifold stuff...)
Yeeeeeeah.... that's going to be tricky. I have absolutely no idea how much energy that would even theoretically take.
The husband's been using his physics knowledge more than his extradimensional mathematics for this stuff, I'll try and have a proper talk with him about it when I get a chance. I'm sure he'll have some idea.
a more skilled mage will get the same effect with less effort
Yep, exactly!
[using his radar only intermittently makes sense], but he does need to be able to sense unexpected nearby vampires, so some sort of untwist-detecting sense will be extremely useful.
Yeah, we can probably handwave that in; no reason that can't be a passive sense of his
I pouted and asked why we couldn't just have ether that the 4D-photons travel through, but apparently that's anathema to the whole thing, so.....
Ah. I'm guessing that's because the ether doesn't exist before the dimensions unwind, and actually creating enough matter to fill up that 4D space will take significantly more energy than even the gargoyle's 4D body can store. (The radar sense needs to be able to 'see' using some means that doesn't require matter - much like light doesn't require matter, so some sort of 4D light analogue).
Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Though I'm wondering if we go down the Calabi-Yau manifolds if it's not going to look very, very silly in 50 years when we discover SuperPhysics: Physics 3.0 - but vintage sci-fi is always like that, so whatever.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
Emotional harm: probably, but only extreme emotional harm, so he wouldn't be full of white lies (probably total unyielding honesty would be one of his requirements, anyway)
That sounds sensible. (Also, it's worth considering that the emotional harm from finding out about the lies would almost always exceed the emotional harm prevented by the lies in the first place).
yes, he would have to protect William's allies if reasonable. He wouldn't be required to prevent harm to the vombie; or maybe he is by default, but he would have been given specific instructions to keep the vombie alive but not allow it to harm anyone William wouldn't want to harm.
We've already previously established that he is permitted to restrain William (without harming him). So the same would go for the vombie - even if he is required to protect the vombie, he is permitted to restrain it (and if the vombie would harm William's protege, I'd argue that the gargoyle would be compelled to restrain the vombie).
The interesting question here is whether or not the gargoyle would be able to allow the vombie to be re-staked.
He's also compelled to obey William's orders.
Can William order him to harm William?
Consider what happens if William gets his foot caught in a bear trap shortly before dawn. If the gargoyle cuts off the foot, then William can get to safety before sunrise; if not, the rising sun will kill him.
Is the gargoyle:
- Unable to harm William by cutting off his foot? (Or, worse, constrained to prevent anyone else from doing so as well?)
- Able to cause temporary harm now in order to prevent greater harm?
- Forced to take a third option of some sort (e.g. wrapping his wings around William to block out all light before turning to stone for the day)?
And can orders from William change which of these options the gargoyle can take?
(Sorry I forgot to reply to this section before btw!)
No worries.
I worry about that. I don't enjoy reading our logs if we gloss over things that I consider would be necessary to include to establish later scenes - then again, I suppose that would come under "tell your story", since "ignore narrative structure" does not mean "throw everything to the wind and just do a highlight reel".
Yeah, you can always go back and edit those scenes in later, but it's probably best to include them from the start. But you shouldn't let some arbitrary rules get in the way of your story.
Added to that there's no "one story", things start and stop and run parallel to each other
Yes, there are lots of stories like that. Some of them unify the disparate scenes by having some sort of overarching theme running through the whole thing, others have the separate plot threads all weave into a single story (or at least all crash into each other in one big climactic scene), while others just have them weave through each other. There's lots of ways to do it.
I suppose part of the process is to select a narrative to choose, stick to it, and then write subsequent narratives as new "books"
That could also work very well.
(Lord of the Rings is a very hard goal to reach. Are you paying attention to the phase of the moon throughout your story? Tolkien did...)
This is something we're pretty bad at (why last night we did a whole, very explicit explanation of vombies - but the protegé asked and William was not going to lie about it - though this stuff can always happen off-screen if it doesn't directly help the narrative).
Having characters describe stuff is fine. They're limited by their knowledge of the subject (though I expect William is very knowledgeable on this matter) and are allowed to get it wrong on occasion, of course.
It just shouldn't be over-done, but it's fine used sparingly.
I have GMed enough RPGs that my advice to new GMs who are like "how do I put hints in my game" are "make it so obvious that you think you are treating them like children, and then make it still more obvious again. They'll still not get it"
Yeah, I wrote a fanfiction once with a twist and I thought I was broadcasting the twist like anything, and I asked before I explicitly revealed it, and... no-one had got it.
Point taken. I wonder how many time skips you can get away with? I suppose we'll see.
"The Last Question" had about half a dozen, I think, and that was a short story. So there's really no hard limit.
Pretty much every year. Unfortunately November is a bad month for me, if Nanowrimo were January or February it might have already happened.
Fine, then. Specify a month. In that month, you write fifty thousand words. Doesn't have to be November.
Voila.
I don't think so, I think the body would start catabolising fat and muscle to create more glucose;
...I admit I'm no doctor, and I have very little idea about hoow the human body stores energy. But I don't think you want to run entirely out like that, even if you can survive it.
Then again, the character with premonitions who sometimes gets nosebleeds that are related to them? Probably related to his complete lack of control over his magic.
Definitely.
Though I'm wondering if we go down the Calabi-Yau manifolds if it's not going to look very, very silly in 50 years when we discover SuperPhysics: Physics 3.0 - but vintage sci-fi is always like that, so whatever.
I remember one short story - Jules Verne, I think, or one of his contemporaries - wherein the protagonist (in America) calls his wife in Europe on the telephone - and, thanks to what is described only as an "ingenious arrangement of mirrors", is able to see her while he talks.
Functionally, it's a videophone...
(The same story had a newspaper office which had revolutionised the industry by having an office full of interns whose job it was, every morning, to phone their subscribers and read them the newspaper over the phone. It looks ridiculous at first, but it carries within it the kernel of the news website...)
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
It's worth considering that the emotional harm from finding out about the lies would almost always exceed the emotional harm prevented by the lies in the first place
It's semi-autobiographical. My boyfriend informed me very early on that he won't lie to me, except when lying is part of a board game. We were having problems partly because of that horrible honesty, he wouldn't do the white lies that are sometimes necessary for a relationship to function. So I told him he could start lying. And he did. It lasted a couple of hours before I realised that as much as I hated the honesty, it was really, really great to be able to trust everything he said implicitly, and now he was explicitly able to lie I just couldn't trust a word he said anymore.
So while I have problems with lying - in that I do it a lot and really feel I can't help it sometimes - I think absolute unyielding honesty is a really great feature for a relationship, especially for what is literally a master/slave type relationship.
The interesting question here is whether or not the gargoyle would be able to allow the vombie to be re-staked.
He not only allowed it but encouraged it, so I guess he mustn't see the vombie as the same person. Makes sense - if he was owned by a human who was an identical twin, it wouldn't make sense for him to obey/protect both of them.
Consider what happens if William gets his foot caught in a bear trap shortly before dawn. If the gargoyle cuts off the foot, then William can get to safety before sunrise; if not, the rising sun will kill him.
This is like the "would a vegetarian eat a pig on a desert island" question in that it would never happen in real life where that was the only two options; in the situation at hand, the gargoyle would be more likely to rip the trap out of the ground, William could cut off his own foot, etc.
But to answer it in the trolley problem spirit in which it was asked, the gargoyle is effectively a really, really good friend who wants what's best for William.
Is the gargoyle:
- Unable to harm William by cutting off his foot? (Or, worse, constrained to prevent anyone else from doing so as well?)
When the benefits are reasonably foreseeable, he'd have no problem with doing it himself or allowing someone else to, though he'd probably urge a more prudent course of action if he could think of one (i.e. ripping the trap out of the floor).
- Able to cause temporary harm now in order to prevent greater harm?
Yep.
- Forced to take a third option of some sort (e.g. wrapping his wings around William to block out all light before turning to stone for the day)?
Not forced to, but able to, naturally. He'd take William's values into account and if William e.g. had a banquet to be at the next evening and being stuck under gargoyle wings all day would interfere with preparations/etc, he'd be more likely to err on the side of ripping his foot off than if e.g. William was going to compete in the vampire olympics sprint event the next evening when the foot would come in handy.
(Lord of the Rings is a very hard goal to reach. Are you paying attention to the phase of the moon throughout your story? Tolkien did...)
Definitely not aiming that high. "Readable and coherent enough that my mother will enjoy it" is what I'm going for, with "sells ten copies on amazon" the "OMG WE HAVE ACHIEVED GREAT THINGS" condition.
[Exposition] just shouldn't be over-done, but it's fine used sparingly.
Yeah. I think we use exposition as a device in roleplaying because it ensures we are both on the same page with how the physics of the world works. In a novel, that is not necessary - the reader just needs to know enough not to feel confused.
I wrote a fanfiction once with a twist and I thought I was broadcasting the twist like anything, and I asked before I explicitly revealed it, and... no-one had got it.
What sort of fanfiction? I almost wish our story was fanfiction (it started as pokemon fanfiction a long, long time ago) because the community seems so awesomely supportive.
"The Last Question" had about half a dozen [time skips], I think, and that was a short story. So there's really no hard limit.
That was also one of the greatest sci-fi writers of his generation, in what was widely considered one of his greatest stories, where the entire plot about time skips to an extent. Asimov is also notorious for his hollow characters, and I think character development is what can really suffer during time skips, since you can have the plucky young detective all of a sudden become the hard grizzled detective and not get the satisfaction of seeing what caused it.
Fine, then. Specify a month. In that month, you write fifty thousand words. Doesn't have to be November.
Penciling in January. Will probably write a story of Red and William's life as that will cover most of the characters and will put the "vampire hunting protagonist" in as an antagonist; that said it will mute the feminist themes a lot by having the main characters both be men. Regardless, watch this space, I guess????
...I admit I'm no doctor, and I have very little idea about hoow the human body stores energy. But I don't think you want to run entirely out like that, even if you can survive it.
Glycogen is basically sugar that is stored in your muscles so that it can quickly be used when you move them, without having to call on reserves from elsewhere in the body. When you get tired during exercise, that's because the glycogen stores in the muscles you used have run out (also not a doctor but that's how I remember it). It's basically your body's quick source of energy, while fat is the "slow source".
I remember one short story - Jules Verne, I think, or one of his contemporaries - wherein the protagonist (in America) calls his wife in Europe on the telephone - and, thanks to what is described only as an "ingenious arrangement of mirrors", is able to see her while he talks.
I love the trope of describing technology as "an ingenious arrangement of mirrors" - it is basically saying to the reader "this is what they are using, but please don't ask why".
(The same story had a newspaper office which had revolutionised the industry by having an office full of interns whose job it was, every morning, to phone their subscribers and read them the newspaper over the phone. It looks ridiculous at first, but it carries within it the kernel of the news website...)
I remember a website that listed a lot of futurists' (Kurtzweil and I think Clarke or Asimov) predictions for the future and evaluated them, but it also had a really cool little page where they listed ways that you could use 1950s language to predict modern technology. Like, "if they had got it right, this is what they'd have predicted" sort of thing. I've never been able to find the page since though!
It was really cool because it made our technology sound so futuristic, written in that optimistic 1950s "visions of the year 2000" style.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
So while I have problems with lying - in that I do it a lot and really feel I can't help it sometimes - I think absolute unyielding honesty is a really great feature for a relationship, especially for what is literally a master/slave type relationship.
I think you are right about unyielding honesty. And it's certainly a feature you want to build in when you build a bodyguard, therefore the gargoyle should have it.
He not only allowed it but encouraged it, so I guess he mustn't see the vombie as the same person.
Alternatively, he doesn't see staking a vampire as (significantly) harming it, since the stake can be removed at any time and the vampire's back up to full strength in moments. (This may have implications for William; if William gets too far on the gargoyle's bad side, the gargoyle might be able to stake him and then guard his unconscious body without actually breaking his own rules).
This is like the "would a vegetarian eat a pig on a desert island" question in that it would never happen in real life where that was the only two options; in the situation at hand, the gargoyle would be more likely to rip the trap out of the ground, William could cut off his own foot, etc.
Exactly. This is about the gargoyle's character, not about a realistic situation.
When the benefits are reasonably foreseeable, he'd have no problem with doing it himself or allowing someone else to, though he'd probably urge a more prudent course of action if he could think of one (i.e. ripping the trap out of the floor).
Okay, that's straightforward enough.
Not forced to, but able to, naturally. He'd take William's values into account and if William e.g. had a banquet to be at the next evening and being stuck under gargoyle wings all day would interfere with preparations/etc, he'd be more likely to err on the side of ripping his foot off than if e.g. William was going to compete in the vampire olympics sprint event the next evening when the foot would come in handy.
That makes sense. It also implies that William's orders can change the gargoyle's actions in such a circumstance - thus William can, in at least a limited way, order the gargoyle to directly harm William.
Definitely not aiming that high. "Readable and coherent enough that my mother will enjoy it" is what I'm going for, with "sells ten copies on amazon" the "OMG WE HAVE ACHIEVED GREAT THINGS" condition.
Shouldn't be hard, with a bit of advertising.
Yeah. I think we use exposition as a device in roleplaying because it ensures we are both on the same page with how the physics of the world works. In a novel, that is not necessary - the reader just needs to know enough not to feel confused.
I read an article a while back, centered around the idea that the ability of magic to solve problems for the protagonists should be directly proportional to how well explained it is.
That is to say, unexplained magic should only ever cause problems for the protagonist. (Example; Lord of the Rings, Gandalf's magic is never really all that well explained, but how often does he use it to the benefit of the protagonists? And when he does - to stop the Balrog - there's a cost; Gandalf is immediately gone.) On the other hand, the protagonist should only ever be able to get out of trouble using magic that has been fully explained to the reader. In advance.
I think that's a good guide on when to or not to use exposition of your magic system.
What sort of fanfiction?
Paradox (MLP/Dr. Who crossover)
Actually, here's a challenge - see if you can figure out what's going on before reading the chapter "Paradox Explained". (One guy in the comments already did, so it might be a good idea to avoid the comments at first).
Then, once you know what's going on (whether you read the "Paradox Explained" chapter or figured it out yourself) go back and see how many hints I left.
That was also one of the greatest sci-fi writers of his generation, in what was widely considered one of his greatest stories, where the entire plot about time skips to an extent.
You have a point.
Asimov is also notorious for his hollow characters, and I think character development is what can really suffer during time skips, since you can have the plucky young detective all of a sudden become the hard grizzled detective and not get the satisfaction of seeing what caused it.
Okay, if your protagonist is showing significant development during the time skip, then you shouldn't be having the skip. (Or, at best, that's a skip between Book One and Book Two).
Penciling in January. Will probably write a story of Red and William's life as that will cover most of the characters and will put the "vampire hunting protagonist" in as an antagonist; that said it will mute the feminist themes a lot by having the main characters both be men. Regardless, watch this space, I guess????
January? Fair enough. I'll try to remember to encourage you.
Glycogen is basically sugar that is stored in your muscles so that it can quickly be used when you move them, without having to call on reserves from elsewhere in the body. When you get tired during exercise, that's because the glycogen stores in the muscles you used have run out (also not a doctor but that's how I remember it). It's basically your body's quick source of energy, while fat is the "slow source".
...that sounds like it might be right, I guess.
I love the trope of describing technology as "an ingenious arrangement of mirrors" - it is basically saying to the reader "this is what they are using, but please don't ask why".
Yeah, "ingenious" is a great word for "it works, but we're leaving all the explanations off-stage".
I remember a website that listed a lot of futurists' (Kurtzweil and I think Clarke or Asimov) predictions for the future and evaluated them, but it also had a really cool little page where they listed ways that you could use 1950s language to predict modern technology. Like, "if they had got it right, this is what they'd have predicted" sort of thing. I've never been able to find the page since though!
That does sound like a really cool page!
...I've tried googling briefly, but haven't been able to find it either.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Ok, reading paradox now.
Up to chapter 3: I think they're in a self fulfilling time loop, probably. Pinkie clearly met time travelling twilight earlier in the day, and twilight probably had to say those random things to keep the loop stable. Didn't realise that the brass watch was a Dr who memory hiding thingy until I saw the chapter title for chapter 3. I am sure I was meant to conclude something based on the hoof polish but not sure what.
After chapter 3: Oh, so the bananas have a purpose. Interesting. Not sure what the Dr would want to kill twilight for. I think I remember the Dr having grey hooves under the polish, so I think it's a doppelganger, though the persistence of the polish is odd.
Chapter 4: So, I was right on the grey being suspicious, only it's just the future Dr not a new guy. Let's see what happens.
Chapter 5: More exposition. Nothing that gives me any ideas. Time will tell.
Unfortunately I have to head home and cook dinner so I will have to get back to the story later!
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Ok, reading more!
Discord: Misspelled je ne sais quoi, but it doesn't mean anything in French. Typo or clue?? The flower means she's almost ready to meet Pinkie
Weird prediction: turns out twilight is paradox. I have no just for it, but I am anticipating a twist, so....
dIsCoRd: Couldn't see anything hinty here.
The Cutie Mark Crusaders: Evidence paradox could be twilight emerges. Closed the loop with Pinkie.
The Nightmare Confrontation: Something is about to go down but I'm not sure what exactly.
The Celestia Confrontation: This chapter seems superfluous so I'm sure I missed something important in it.
Pre Paradox Explained: Well, I haven't read the chapter yet and as you can see I've got no clue about the twist. I know that the doctor isn't paradox. I suspect it will be one of the three princesses, but only because it has to be someone featured in the story. I am not sure who would have the ostensible goal of killing twilight. The doctor may have been wrong or lying about the hoof polish being poison?
Paradox Explained: Huh, so he's a time loop creature. Cool!
Side Effects: Nice to have some closure. Discord is a cool character.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
Up to chapter 3: I think they're in a self fulfilling time loop, probably.
Misspelled je ne sais quoi
Weird prediction: turns out twilight is paradox. I have no just for it, but I am anticipating a twist, so....
...okay, that would have been weird.
The Cutie Mark Crusaders: Evidence paradox could be twilight emerges.
Confirmation bias? I certainly didn't try to put that in...
Pre Paradox Explained: Well, I haven't read the chapter yet and as you can see I've got no clue about the twist. I know that the doctor isn't paradox. I suspect it will be one of the three princesses, but only because it has to be someone featured in the story. I am not sure who would have the ostensible goal of killing twilight. The doctor may have been wrong or lying about the hoof polish being poison?
You're on par with all the readers so far except one. (Remember, I thought I was being obvious when I wrote this. Now that you know the twist, would you like to know how many hints I left in advance?)
Discord is a cool character.
He is. Very much so.
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
I think you are right about unyielding honesty. And it's certainly a feature you want to build in when you build a bodyguard, therefore the gargoyle should have it.
Unyielding honesty to his master. To others: probably like celestAI, he's honest almost all the time because to be otherwise would make him untrustworthy for future transactions.
If William gets too far on the gargoyle's bad side, the gargoyle might be able to stake him and then guard his unconscious body without actually breaking his own rules.
I don't think the gargoyle would be able to do that; like I said, he's more a "friend who always wants what is best for you", and what's best for you is probably not having a stake in your heart for all eternity. Then again, if he got really pissed at William he might put a lot of effort into manufacturing a situation where the stake would be William's best option (set a chain of events so one of William's big rivals is in town; convince William that his choices are die nobly in combat or get himself staked somewhere secure and wait for things to blow over; encourage him to choose the latter; tell the rival that you have William in an undisclosed location, and as long as you promise never to harm him or find out the location, he will devote as much resources as possible to protecting the rival; bam! you basically have William comatose for all time, the rival in power and reasonably happy with the situation, and you can do whatever you want. Moral: do not piss off The Help.)
That makes sense. It also implies that William's orders can change the gargoyle's actions in such a circumstance - thus William can, in at least a limited way, order the gargoyle to directly harm William.
Pretty much. "beat me up real good so it looks like my story of being attacked was true" and so on.
Shouldn't be hard [to sell 10 copies], with a bit of advertising.
Advertising: $100
Gross revenue: $10
Being able to be smug: Priceless
;). Getting ahead of ourselves here. Geez if I'm serious about my Mum reading it I'd have to buy her a kindle.
I read an article a while back, centered around the idea that the ability of magic to solve problems for the protagonists should be directly proportional to how well explained it is.
That makes a lot of sense, actually. Deus Ex Machina is basically the antithesis to this as it offers no explanation. I will keep that in mind. I'm getting very excited about the thought of having all these deeply hidden well-explained mechanics in an otherwise pretty run-of-the-mill supernatural romance.
Paradox (MLP/Dr. Who crossover)
I've recently read basically everything in the Friendship is Optimal universe, so I'm surprisingly down for another MLP fic. My Dr Who knowledge basically starts at the beginning of the reboot(? continuation?) and then stops at the end of Amy, so hopefully there's no big points of confusion for me.
Actually, here's a challenge - see if you can figure out what's going on before reading the chapter "Paradox Explained". (One guy in the comments already did, so it might be a good idea to avoid the comments at first).
I will be on the lookout for some sort of twist/background explanation. I'll have a chance to read your story over the next few days so I will let you know :)
January? Fair enough. I'll try to remember to encourage you.
January's good for me! No university, work will be relatively quiet, and all the Christmas stuff is over. Thanks for that. My roleplay partner will also be writing an action/friendship story from the same universe so we'll be editing and reading each other's stuff, which will hopefully be really good encouragement. I'll have to get an outline sorted, since there's a lot of history stuff I want to put in, questions to ask myself. Like, the story is about a vampire (William) who as a human was the king of the Frankish people circa 580 CE; we pick his story up in ~1940 when he meets a young defecting American soldier (Red), they fall in love, Red becomes a thrall, decides he doesn't like the implicit slavery, ultimately ends up becoming a vampire, because while dying he begs William to turn him, and they both have a hard time adjusting to that. I kind of want to have a prolog with William's life/death, or maybe use a literary device of flashbacks, or something, or should I just keep it from Red's angle of vision so we can start in the 1940s and not really delve all that much????
Just thinking alloud here. I think I'll probably write low-quality drabble for all the above, work out what I like best and then expand and edit it.
That does sound like a really cool page!
...I've tried googling briefly, but haven't been able to find it either.
I also tried googling it to no avail. It was almost definitely featuring Clarke's 1964 predictions for the year 2000, I feel like the page was a sort of seafoam colour or maybe like pale purple, simple times new roman sort of text on that background, very late 90s looking, it wasn't part of a blog or anything like that. I lost it previously and it showed up in my Facebook memories and I read through it again and was so happy to have found it again, and then proceeded to lose it a second time. So, we've got a 12 month wait, unless facebook has a good search - OH MY GOD IT DOES!!!! I FOUND IT!!
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/retro/
Check how bad my prediction of its colour scheme was!! BUT HERE IT IS. There are links to evaluations of the futurists' predictions on the bottom.
(oh and I posted it on May 20, 2011, so we would have been in for a wait if we were waiting for my memories to come around again)
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
Unyielding honesty to his master.
Well, yeah. Unyielding honesty within the master/slave relationship. He has to be able to lie to protect William.
Then again, if he got really pissed at William he might put a lot of effort into manufacturing a situation where the stake would be William's best option
Yeah. Never make the Help that angry.
Rules only go so far.
Advertising: $100
Gross revenue: $10
Being able to be smug: Priceless
Eh. You don't have to spend money to get advertising. Send a free copy to your local radio station's book reviewer. Get friends and family to post reviews. That sort of thing.
I've recently read basically everything in the Friendship is Optimal universe, so I'm surprisingly down for another MLP fic. My Dr Who knowledge basically starts at the beginning of the reboot(? continuation?) and then stops at the end of Amy, so hopefully there's no big points of confusion for me.
There shouldn't be any big points of confusion. You probably know more about Dr. Who than I do...
I will be on the lookout for some sort of twist/background explanation. I'll have a chance to read your story over the next few days so I will let you know :)
I kind of want to have a prolog with William's life/death, or maybe use a literary device of flashbacks, or something, or should I just keep it from Red's angle of vision so we can start in the 1940s and not really delve all that much????
That depends, really. How important is William's history for the reader?
Check how bad my prediction of its colour scheme was!! BUT HERE IT IS. There are links to evaluations of the futurists' predictions on the bottom.
...huh. I was expecting something... steampunkier.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Also, I forgot: vampires are vulnerable to silver as well as fire. A deliberate Achilles heel by the atlanteans, or did the early settlers of Earth merely enchant all the silver on the planet? Perhaps they cursed a few vampires to be vulnerable to silver, and they are all the common ancestor of the ones that sill live? Who knows....
There shouldn't be any big points of confusion. You probably know more about Dr. Who than I do...
Well, I'm about to go walk the dog, and I intend to find a cafe to sit at and start and finish your story. The said it's 3pm now which is apparently the magic time all the cafes close, so we'll see if that eventuates.
How important is William's history for the reader?
Not very, but how important is anything for the reader? I mean, I write it because I find it interesting, and I find William's past interesting - but I've been invested in William in one guise or another for 15 years so, you know, I'm a special case.
He's a pretty tropey vampire though, except that he's a devout catholic - though non-practicing, and, um, a practising bisexual, so that's a bit odd. But he probably has very different ideas about love, relationships, and sexuality based on where he grew up and also the intervening 1500 years of immortality. Would vampire society be more socially progressive? My incarnation of it is very, very strict, full of symbolism, but with some red in tooth and claw stuff in there too. I suppose a series of powerful vampires would just keep on adding things to the list of rules, which most everyone is intelligent enough to remember, so you could build a whole bunch of crap like that up.
...huh. I was expecting something... steampunkier.
Yeah I probably built it up to be more than it was. But at least you know it was mildly disappointing rather than having to wait to find out, so that's something, yeah?
Looks interesting, though the old timey style is very... thick.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
Also, I forgot: vampires are vulnerable to silver as well as fire. A deliberate Achilles heel by the atlanteans, or did the early settlers of Earth merely enchant all the silver on the planet? Perhaps they cursed a few vampires to be vulnerable to silver, and they are all the common ancestor of the ones that sill live?
Hmmmm. Looking into alchemical history, I see that silver was associated with the moon, while gold was associated with the sun. Hmmmmmm. Would have worked out better the other way round.
It could always turn our that silver is a sort of magical conductor (you'd have particularly ancient or powerful runes being made of silver) so that stabbing a vampire with a silver dagger is a bit like dropping a computer in water - it conducts all the energy to the wrong places and makes it stop working properly.
Or the old alchemists got it backwards, and silver is harmful due to having a sympathetic link to the Sun.
Not very, but how important is anything for the reader?
I meant in terms of how necessary it is to understand the rest of the story. If you need to know all about William's history to understand why he does what he does in chapter seven, then (those parts of) his history deserve greater narrative prominence. If it has really no effect on the story one way or another, then it can be relegated to an appendix or a prequel.
Would vampire society be more socially progressive?
No, it would almost certainly be more conservative in just about every way, I think. All the vampires were blending in fine three to five hundred years ago, and they get a bit set in their ways as they get older, and don't like to change... some vampires might start out progressive, but give them a couple of centuries and society will progress faster than they do...
Of course, they also don't really answer to human social pressure, so there will be a strong strain of independence running through them.
Yeah I probably built it up to be more than it was. But at least you know it was mildly disappointing rather than having to wait to find out, so that's something, yeah?
Yeah, that's something.
Looks interesting, though the old timey style is very... thick.
Well, it was actually written in the old-timey, so it has a very good excuse.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Now you mention the moon, something that bugs me - if I say a vampire would be burned by Sol when they were on alpha centauri, and if I say an ingenious system of mirrors could kill a vampire (which I'm not 100% sold on), then how does the moon, which is lit up with sunlight, not kill a vampire? It's not a dose-response as vampires get more sensitive to the sun with time. Does the moon have magical properties that removes the curse from the sunlight?
(Werewolves have nothing to do with the moon in this universe, so no need to worry about our lupine friends).
Silver was associated with the moon, while gold was associated with the sun.
You know what - we're not wedded to silver being the vampire-killing-metal except by folklore. Maybe we can just retroactively make all silver into gold, then the alchemy kind of makes sense - or perhaps the alchemists got it backwards like you said. Gold makes anti vampire nets fabulously expensive, and, well, gold is pretty useless for things like daggers and knives because it's soft. If we go for gold, how pure would it need to be? I suppose the purer the more of an effect.
Let's back up - if we want a metal that is bad for vampires and can be used similarly to silver, can we, from first principles, think of something that would make sense? Iron might be an interesting choice as I think it's the heaviest thing that stellar fusion will produce before going nova, but it's also far too common - though giving iron magical properties will make anti vampire combat more.... accessible to the common man, and dangerous for a vampire.
It could always turn our that silver is a sort of magical conductor (you'd have particularly ancient or powerful runes being made of silver) so that stabbing a vampire with a silver dagger is a bit like dropping a computer in water - it conducts all the energy to the wrong places and makes it stop working properly.
Another interesting thought. Would have the side effect of mages having silver wands or whathaveyou.
I meant in terms of how necessary it is to understand the rest of the story. If you need to know all about William's history to understand why he does what he does in chapter seven, then (those parts of) his history deserve greater narrative prominence. If it has really no effect on the story one way or another, then it can be relegated to an appendix or a prequel.
You're making me remember this great novel I read as a teenager - Asturias by Brian Caswell - that was about the trials and tribulations of a band, but also had these little interludes about the Spanish civil war - completely irrelevant to the story. I was always bored by the interludes and skipped them, and still loved the book. (Now I want to track it down and see if the interludes are helpful or not...)
Vampire society would almost certainly be more conservative in just about every way, I think.
Yeah, that's what I'm a bit afraid of. They say scientific advances get accepted when everyone who fought against them dies. Then again, the underground society has different sexual and social mores, and vampires would be exposed to that in short order, so they are not just influenced by humans, at least - and maybe finding out that centaur society has a 4:1 m:f ratio, and high ranking females have about 10 husbands, among other things, would have a certain influence on vampire society on its own too. Or maybe the vampires will clutch their pearls in horror; who knows.
I guess you could spin it this way: vampire society is more conservative, only what they've conserved from their "original" (i.e. atlantis 70 000 BCE) society is what we find very liberal today. New vampires are quickly given a culture shock but eventually manage to fit in.
If you'll excuse the terminology: human society slowly deviated from vampire society to become more "right wing", because of slavery or farming or something, and has slowly been deviating back to "left wing" ever since, maybe oscillating about like a sine wave.
All the vampires were blending in fine three to five hundred years ago, and they get a bit set in their ways as they get older, and don't like to change... some vampires might start out progressive, but give them a couple of centuries and society will progress faster than they do...
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
how does the moon, which is lit up with sunlight, not kill a vampire?
Hmmm. It's not just the moon. Let us say that Tom Swift (human) is standing in the middle of a brightly-lit street at noon, looking at the vampire's mansion, and he sees the vampire looking out from a darkened, shadowy window. The vampire's not in direct sunlight, but the sunlight hitting Tom's face is being reflected back at the window - surely the vampire doesn't die just because he can see Tom.
So. Thinking about this, what if it's not the light that does anything at all? The vampires are damaged by anything that's associated with the Sun or solar magic (fire, perhaps gold). So how about if, instead of light being what damages the vampire, it's the image of the Sun?
Direct sunlight, focused by a lens onto a suitable surface, produces an image of the Sun. So direct sunlight, in essence, contains that image; any surface on which direct sunlight falls is being assaulted with millions of tiny pictures of the Sun. Even a small speck of sunlight. (Large areas contain millions of overlapping images). Reflecting it from a good reflector (like a mirror) preserves that image, and thus is still lethal to vampires; but reflecting it off the Moon (or Tom's face) destroys the image of the Sun, leaving just harmless light.
(Of course, the vampires themselves are - at least most of them - unaware of this subtlety)
This has a consequence, that a vampire will burn when coming in contact with a sufficiently detailed picture of the Sun. (Your average "yellow circle with rays coming out" isn't going to make the cut - as a rule of thumb, I'd say it needs to be detailed enough to make out the sunspots, which means that even an image taken with an ordinary camera will be insufficient, but (say) a poster hanging in an astronomy lab, showing a very detailed photo of the Sun, will burn a vampire that touches it (worse, if it's a small enough picture, then it leaves a burn on the vampire which is itself a complete image of the Sun, so the burn itself keeps eating through him like acid until he cuts off that limb. I can imagine a completely oblivious astronomer who's gained an entirely undeserved reputation as a powerful vampire hunter, simply because he has a novelty doorknob that's an accurate carving of the sun, and every vampire that grabs it ends up dead unless he cuts off his hand (and the astronomer has no idea why he sometimes hears screaming outside his door, but there's always just a pile of ash out there when he opens it). Or maybe he has a gold ring, with a really accurate image of the Sun on it - in gold - in place of a stone (a gift from his faculty, perhaps) which causes similar problems every time he shakes a vampire's hand... which really frightens the astronomer because he has no idea why this guy's suddenly lying on the floor, grabbing his own wrist, and screaming, so he naturally calls an ambulance)).
Incidentally, vampires are very lucky that photons don't travel outside the normal 3D universe, or they wouldn't be able to hide from sunlight at all.
Let's back up - if we want a metal that is bad for vampires and can be used similarly to silver, can we, from first principles, think of something that would make sense?
Silver is an element. As a general rule, if you want an "element with similar properties", look for other elements in the same column in the periodic table.
For silver, this means copper or gold. (Or Roentgenium, which is one of these elements which has to be created artificially and was only discovered in 1994, so we can discard that one, I think).
If gold is what's harmful to vampires, then some very forward-thinking vampires have probably been spending several centuries carefully corrupting the mythology - spreading rumours that it's actually silver which is use.
Silver and garlic. Oh, and crucifixes. If you want to kill a vampire, you need silver, garlic, and holy symbols. Seriously. Would I lie to you?
Another interesting thought. Would have the side effect of mages having silver wands or whathaveyou.
Not pure silver wands, but wands with delicate traceries of silver running along and through them, looking kind of like printed circuitry, sending the magic where it's supposed to go.
You're making me remember this great novel I read as a teenager - Asturias by Brian Caswell - that was about the trials and tribulations of a band, but also had these little interludes about the Spanish civil war - completely irrelevant to the story.
Yeah, relevance is important. If it's in the main story, then it needs to contribute to the main story in some way. (The reader might only find out how it contributes right near the end of the book, of course - but it does need to contribute).
I guess you could spin it this way: vampire society is more conservative, only what they've conserved from their "original" (i.e. atlantis 70 000 BCE) society is what we find very liberal today.
You could go with that. Or you could go with the idea that vampires no longer feel constrained by human social mores - humans are little more than cattle now, and there's no need to fit in anymore. Vampire society could have a decadent, unconstrained feel to it - a vampire does what he wants because there's no-one around who can stop him.
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
how does the moon, which is lit up with sunlight, not kill a vampire?
So how about if, instead of light being what damages the vampire, it's the image of the Sun?
That's an interesting thought - not sure if I go for it yet. It's very complicated, though it need not 'face the reader' as such.
It seems cleaner that the act of reflecting off the moon, someone's face, hey, even a mirror degrades the sunlight in some way (like I said, I don't think mirrors need to be allowed). The big problem with that is that vampires should still be burned through glass.
This has a consequence, that a vampire will burn when coming in contact with a sufficiently detailed picture of the Sun.
This is interesting. The sun does not just produce visible light, but infrared, ultraviolet, etc. Given this, there's no reason a picture of the sun that's accurate solely in the visible spectrum would burn a vampire - the other stuff the sun produces is just as bad (though - do the sun's radio waves get stopped by the shadow of the earth at night? Its neutrinos certainly wouldn't, though those aren't electromagnetic radiation).
I think you could say that everything the sun produces - radio waves, visible light, ultraviolet, etc have to combine in just the right ratios - ratios that are unique to sol's particular elemental makeup - to kill a vampire.
astronomer vampire killer
Cool idea if the image of the sun thing can be tweaked to allow this. The gold might be enough (though nobody can afford a golden doorknob...)
Incidentally, vampires are very lucky that photons don't travel outside the normal 3D universe, or they wouldn't be able to hide from sunlight at all.
... eep. Yes.
Let's back up - if we want a metal that is bad for vampires and can be used similarly to silver, can we, from first principles, think of something that would make sense?
Silver is an element. As a general rule, if you want an "element with similar properties", look for other elements in the same column in the periodic table.
Oo, I didn't mean it so literally; I meant, is there something you can 'use' in some reasonable way (like iron, lead, silver, gold), would be available to, say, bronze-age people (aluminium is a bad choice) and has scientific or alchemical properties that would lend it to being vampire bane?
Gold seems to work quite well though, for its sympathy with the sun and for its position near silver on the periodic table. Plus, it's kind of an interesting restriction to put on them.
If gold is what's harmful to vampires, then some very forward-thinking vampires have probably been spending several centuries carefully corrupting the mythology - spreading rumours that it's actually silver which is used.
Yep. I could also see, say, electrum being used to fight vampires, and people assuming the silver is what was having the effect. It would also have interesting connotations with vampires and money in ancient times. Hmmm.
Silver and garlic. Oh, and crucifixes. If you want to kill a vampire, you need silver, garlic, and holy symbols. Seriously. Would I lie to you?
And counting. Yeah. They can't resist counting things, so just drop some poppy seeds, no vampire would be able to go past that.
Another interesting thought. Would have the side effect of mages having silver wands or whathaveyou.
Not pure silver wands, but wands with delicate traceries of silver running along and through them, looking kind of like printed circuitry, sending the magic where it's supposed to go.
That sounds awesome. Yes!
Yeah, relevance is important. If it's in the main story, then it needs to contribute to the main story in some way. (The reader might only find out how it contributes right near the end of the book, of course - but it does need to contribute).
I bet you that story about the spanish civil war was completely relevant to the actual story because the reviews I read of it spoke very highly of the metaphors and stuff. Maybe I was just a teenager who really wanted to read about the cool band and not the dumb civil war.
I guess you could spin it this way: vampire society is more conservative, only what they've conserved from their "original" (i.e. atlantis 70 000 BCE) society is what we find very liberal today.
You could go with that. Or you could go with the idea that vampires no longer feel constrained by human social mores - humans are little more than cattle now, and there's no need to fit in anymore. Vampire society could have a decadent, unconstrained feel to it - a vampire does what he wants because there's no-one around who can stop him.
No need to fit in with humans, but yes with other vampires, who have cultural baggage from before written language was rediscovered. I like that. Especially because you'd imagine that many vampires would spend a few decades at least, early on, doing all sorts of high risk activities that they never got the opportunity to do as humans. After all, when your family has been dead for centuries, and there's no need for you to marry and continue the royal bloodline - it's continuing fine without you, or it did until that pesky French revolution - then of course you're going to pursue those things that make you happy. You've done just about everything you could possibly do out of duty, after all!
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
It seems cleaner that the act of reflecting off the moon, someone's face, hey, even a mirror degrades the sunlight in some way (like I said, I don't think mirrors need to be allowed)
That's also reasonable, and it allows you to disallow mirrors.
Image-of-the-sun means that mirrors must work, but... hmmm. How reflective is the average mirror to ultraviolet, infrared, and other non-visible frequencies? You might need to use special vampire-hunting mirrors... or maybe a mirror image of the Sun doesn't work, and you need to use an even number of mirrors.
The big problem with that is that vampires should still be burned through glass.
Hmmmm. Which means you're limited to considering those frequencies that glass is transparent to. (And if the sunlight relies on some non-visible wavelength(s) that glass is transparent to, then special glass can be made that's opaque to those wavelengths, through which a vampire could in theory see the Sun (until a vampire hunter swaps out one of his panes of glass for regular glass, or smashes it at the right time, or...))
though - do the sun's radio waves get stopped by the shadow of the earth at night?
There's a lot of Earth in there, and a lot of it's very dense. Not much is able to go right through it.
I think you could say that everything the sun produces - radio waves, visible light, ultraviolet, etc have to combine in just the right ratios - ratios that are unique to sol's particular elemental makeup - to kill a vampire.
It can't be everything; a lot of glass blocks at least some ultraviolet rays.
Cool idea if the image of the sun thing can be tweaked to allow this. The gold might be enough (though nobody can afford a golden doorknob...)
Gold-plated. Or electrum-plated. It just needs gold on the outside (and preferably in a way that doesn't make it obvious to a vampire that it is gold, so he doesn't know to be cautious).
Yep. I could also see, say, electrum being used to fight vampires, and people assuming the silver is what was having the effect. It would also have interesting connotations with vampires and money in ancient times. Hmmm.
Have you ever wondered why so much gold is dug up and then buried in hidden vaults? With armed guards? Where no-one can get at it for the purpose of making anti-vampire weaponry?
It would be very easy to postulate the hidden hands of influential vampires throughout history leading to that particular situation...
That sounds awesome. Yes!
It also means you might have different wands for different purposes. This one for fireballs, that one for lifting things the other one over there to turn pumpkins into carriages...
Of course, rarest of all would be a reprogrammable wand.
After all, when your family has been dead for centuries, and there's no need for you to marry and continue the royal bloodline - it's continuing fine without you, or it did until that pesky French revolution - then of course you're going to pursue those things that make you happy.
Can vampires even have children? Mythology tends to be a bit wishy-washy on that idea - sometimes they can only reproduce through biting (since a corpse is unable to have children), but then you get other myths that involve half-vampires, which I don't see working with your vampires...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
(sorry I took so long to reply, I've been sick as anything the past week and I like to be able to think clearly when replying to your messages!)
The big problem with that is that vampires should still be burned through glass.
Hmmmm. Which means you're limited to considering those frequencies that glass is transparent to.
Booo! It looks like glass is basically only transparent to the visible spectrum - which I'm not 100% sure about because I do embroidery as a hobby and I know glass that is opaque to UV to protect the embroidery (called museum glass) is much more expensive than ordinary glass (i'm talking an extra $100 for an A3 size sheet) - but anyway... umm. This is a problem.
I suppose you could say it's the visible wavelengths that are the problem, and so a mirror will still kill a vampire (like I said, I don't care either way about mirrors, think passing through glass SHOULD kill, and reflecting off the moon SHOULDN'T), but then how does the moon not? It's just degraded or changed too much? We're really going back to the image of the sun, aren't we? Hey, if the shoe fits, maybe I should try it on...
Have you ever wondered why so much gold is dug up and then buried in hidden vaults? With armed guards? Where no-one can get at it for the purpose of making anti-vampire weaponry?
It would be very easy to postulate the hidden hands of influential vampires throughout history leading to that particular situation...
Sounds like Fort Knox is their modern attempt at it. And microchips!
Can vampires even have children? Mythology tends to be a bit wishy-washy on that idea - sometimes they can only reproduce through biting (since a corpse is unable to have children), but then you get other myths that involve half-vampires, which I don't see working with your vampires...
Nah, they can't; you can harvest sperm and eggs for however long you could harvest them from a corpse I guess. I was just thinking you could harvest eggs from a female vampire if you wanted to, but you probably couldn't with modern technology - although the eggs exist from birth, they still need to go through some changes to be 'ready' for ovulation. Same as sperm and the primary spermatocytes. So I think probably with the technology in say 50 years time (less probably) a suitably motivated vampire would be able to have some of their original germ cells extracted and matured in vitro to create a test tube baby with an appropriate surrogate.
Their human body is effectively completely dead, their digestive system just ferments the magical blood so it can be used to make the next vampire (by making an incision and vomiting gross goo into their aorta). All the work is done by the heart and brain.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
(sorry I took so long to reply, I've been sick as anything the past week and I like to be able to think clearly when replying to your messages!)
I'm glad to hear I'm keeping you on your toes!
Booo! It looks like glass is basically only transparent to the visible spectrum - which I'm not 100% sure about because I do embroidery as a hobby and I know glass that is opaque to UV to protect the embroidery (called museum glass) is much more expensive than ordinary glass (i'm talking an extra $100 for an A3 size sheet)
Apparently it depends on the glass
To quote from the article's abstract:
Laminated glass totally blocked UVA radiation, while smooth ordinary glass transmitted the highest dose (74.3%). Greater thicknesses of glass implied less radiation transmitted, but without a significant difference. Green glass totally blocked UVA radiation, while blue glass transmitted the highest dose of radiation (56.8%). The presence of a sunlight control film totally blocked UVA radiation. All glasses totally blocked UVB radiation.
I'm guessing what you're really paying for with that museum glass is the guarantee that all UV is thoroughly blocked.
We're really going back to the image of the sun, aren't we? Hey, if the shoe fits, maybe I should try it on...
The nice thing about it is that it works, at least in terms of passing through glass or reflecting off the moon, and it does so for consistent (albeit less-than-obvious) reasons. And, better yet, it has completely unexpected consequences that will blindside all the characters if they ever happen to occur.
Sounds like Fort Knox is their modern attempt at it. And microchips!
Not just Fort Knox. Banks all around the world! And then, of course, vampires can't handle gold coins - once upon a time, this just meant that they had their ghoul carry the money pouch, but in modern times it's a major driver behind the development of paper money, credit cards, and the watering down of the amount of gold in coins. (Vampires do not like the idea of a rich man having a pocket full of anti-vampire weapons)
Can vampires even have children?
Nah, they can't
Well, that's straightforward and sensible.
I was just thinking you could harvest eggs from a female vampire if you wanted to, but you probably couldn't with modern technology
It's worth remembering that we've already established that a given vampire might have access to technology (in a narrow field) a few years ahead of what's available to baseline humans. So a vampire who really wants children and is willing to put in the effort in biology might be able to manage it (but do you let a jannissary be the surrogate, or would the drugs injected into the jannissary as part of the feeding process have a negative effect on the child? Do you have your jannissaries kidnap a surrogate?) But such children would presumably still be infants in modern times, because even a really motivated vampire hasn't had the technology that long.
Either way, the child would simply have half the DNA of the human that the vampire used to be, and would be human in every way; no messing around with half-vampires. (Though a doting vampire parent would presumably change her child into a vampire before he or she dies of old age - whether this is done in infancy or whether the vampire waits for the child to reach adulthood first will depend on the vampire).
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
We're really going back to the image of the sun, aren't we? Hey, if the shoe fits, maybe I should try it on...
The nice thing about it is that it works, at least in terms of passing through glass or reflecting off the moon, and it does so for consistent (albeit less-than-obvious) reasons.
Yeah. OK. I will put it in the back of my mind and hope I get used to the idea because it seems so... silly. Then again, there's folklore about them not being able to stand the sight of a cross, and how is the sight of the sun any different?
And, better yet, it has completely unexpected consequences that will blindside all the characters if they ever happen to occur.
Yep. Let's hope the local university doesn't have a sunspot specialist whose adoring life partner didn't get a local nano-material printer to make her a special, gold ring for their 50th anniversary.
(Vampires do not like the idea of a rich man having a pocket full of anti-vampire weapons)
Thanks for pointing out that ghouls and money pouches could help them engage in commerce in the real world. I am now imagining that not handling your own money is a vampire custom that has survived more or less intact to this day, though it's beginning to get less adhered to.
would the drugs injected into the jannissary as part of the feeding process have a negative effect on the child?
What's the symptoms of being a heroin baby?
According to one study:
The specific role of the in-utero heroin exposure in the determination of the developmental outcome of these children (if they do not have significant neurological damage), seems to be less important in comparison to the home environment.
And a website says this:
During pregnancy the use of heroin can lead to poor fetal growth, premature delivery, and still birth.
I'm going to say that the kids are probably a little less bright on average, and more likely to be stillborn or miscarried, but they suffer more as a result of their no doubt inevitably unconventional upbringing, and might come into the world addicted to feeding vampires the same way some babies come into the world addicted to heroin.
Either way, the child would simply have half the DNA of the human that the vampire used to be, and would be human in every way; no messing around with half-vampires.
Exactly. If you're a weird enough vampire that the exact DNA mix is important to you, then go nuts I guess, you have weird priorities.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
Yeah. OK. I will put it in the back of my mind and hope I get used to the idea because it seems so... silly. Then again, there's folklore about them not being able to stand the sight of a cross, and how is the sight of the sun any different?
It's not the sight; it's having the image somehow come into contact with the vampire. (Same thing would happen if they actually touched the Sun, but for obvious reasons no vampire has ever actually done that).
But there's precedence in stories about magic - specifically, sympathetic magic. The idea is that things that look alike have a certain degree of magical linkage, and the more alike they look the stronger the link. Harry Dresden used something of the sort when he created a scale model of Chicago to scry with; and the idea of the voodoo practitioner sticking needles in a doll to give the linked person debilitating pain is also linked to this.
In this case, the Sun is cursed - and very strongly cursed - where vampires are concerned; so things that share a sympathetic or magical link with the Sun (i.e. fire, gold (more alchemical than sympathetic, perhaps) and accurate images of the sun) are all harmful to vampires. And the stronger the link, the stronger the effect - gold that's on fire will kill vampires faster than either gold or fire on their own. (Gold that's on fire and looks exactly like the Sun is just overkill).
Yep. Let's hope the local university doesn't have a sunspot specialist whose adoring life partner didn't get a local nano-material printer to make her a special, gold ring for their 50th anniversary.
Honestly, the fact that it's gold is probably enough already... but even the wrong page from a modern astronomy textbook could have a nasty surprise if touched.
I am now imagining that not handling your own money is a vampire custom that has survived more or less intact to this day, though it's beginning to get less adhered to.
...that makes sense, yes.
would the drugs injected into the jannissary as part of the feeding process have a negative effect on the child?
I'm going to say that the kids are probably a little less bright on average, and more likely to be stillborn or miscarried, but they suffer more as a result of their no doubt inevitably unconventional upbringing, and might come into the world addicted to feeding vampires the same way some babies come into the world addicted to heroin.
Okay, so negative effect, yes, but minor. Still, a vampire who goes to that amount of effort just to get a child is going to want everything to be just pErFeCt!!!!
...which means tht the surrogate can be neither jannissary or ghoul. And... there might not be another parent, the child would quite possibly be a straight clone of the vampire. (If there is another "parent", the selection process will be exhaustive, and he'll probably be a Nobel prize winner or Olympic athlete or both and might not know that his DNA has been harvested).
Options include:
- Kidnap someone. Jannissaries in local law enforcement will keep the investigation(s) away.
- The surrogate does not know that the backer is a vampire, she just knows he's really rich and willing to pay off all her debts in exchange for nine months of discomfort and having to follow the provided diet.
- The surrogate was briefly in a hospital where some of the doctors are jannissaries. She does not know the child is not hers (and may or may not be expending significant effort trying to figure out how there could possibly have been a father)
- The surrogate is aware of vampires (and that the parent is one) and has a very good idea of what will happen to her if she objects to anything. Fear keeps her obedient.
After the baby is born, I guess the surrogate might or might not be permitted to leave alive... in some circumstances, the surrogate might end up being a kind of foster parent as well (what vampire really wants to deal with dirty nappies?)
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Then again, there's folklore about them not being able to stand the sight of a cross, and how is the sight of the sun any different?
It's not the sight; it's having the image somehow come into contact with the vampire.
Yeah, sorry; I just connected them thematically even though the analogy isn't quite right. I tend to do that, get very excited about a link and then mis-state it to make it sound better than it is.
In this case, the Sun is cursed - and very strongly cursed - where vampires are concerned; so things that share a sympathetic or magical link with the Sun are all harmful to vampires.
So, what else is harmful? Let's start looking at some medical astrology!
Sun – heart, spine, and general vitality
Here I was thinking "well if the sun rules the spleen I guess we can re-work it so you stake the spleen not the heart" but no the sun rules the heart and the spine in western astrology. Almost too convenient, hey?
From some other pages:
In Ayurveda, it rules over life-force (praan-shakti), governs bile temperament (pitta), stomach, bones and eyes.
So.... I guess we're being western-centric if we don't have the sun be associated with the stomach, bones and eyes - or just the westerners happened to get it "right".
When it comes to plant magic, the sun is associated with a number of flowers and herbs, including sunflowers, daisies, dandelions, chamomile and rosemary. Use these in your workings for a bit of extra solar mojo.
Can you kill a campire with chamomile tea? All signs point to maybe. Having sunflowers be deadly seems a bit on the nose, but they are probably e.g. reagents for a sunlight spell (which definitely exists canonically)
Honestly, the fact that it's gold is probably enough already... but even the wrong page from a modern astronomy textbook could have a nasty surprise if touched.
Here's a question: if we're going for the image of the sun, would touching a full page illustration with the tip of your finger burn you? Or would you have to stick your palm on a smaller-sized image?
Okay, so negative effect, yes, but minor. Still, a vampire who goes to that amount of effort just to get a child is going to want everything to be just pErFeCt!!!!
I'm imagining a young woman being turned by, say, her father or husband-to-be. She wanted nothing more in life than to bear a child, and it kind of ends up with her going a bit bonkers, trying to make it happen, and after three long centuries, conducting her own research into IVF, she has finally gotten somewhere... Damnit, I have a pregnant NPC in the nWoD RPG I'm running, still need to shoehorn something "interesting" about the pregnancy in, I'll keep that in reserve.
...which means tht the surrogate can be neither jannissary or ghoul.
- Kidnap someone. Jannissaries in local law enforcement will keep the investigation(s) away.
- The surrogate does not know that the backer is a vampire, she just knows he's really rich and willing to pay off all her debts in exchange for nine months of discomfort and having to follow the provided diet.
I think this is the most likely way to do it. Little fuss, little mess, almost no risk of being caught. Especially if you have a woman from say, Nepal and her family flown into Standard Western Country - a lot more monetary leverage and maybe you'll illegally get them citizenship. Win-win-win.
- The surrogate was briefly in a hospital where some of the doctors are jannissaries. She does not know the child is not hers (and may or may not be expending significant effort trying to figure out how there could possibly have been a father)
This is horrific I love it. Could totally go down the Jane the Virgin path and end very, very messy.
- The surrogate is aware of vampires (and that the parent is one) and has a very good idea of what will happen to her if she objects to anything. Fear keeps her obedient.
Did your ghoul's wife see something she shouldn't have? May as well get some use out of her before you kill her.
After the baby is born, I guess the surrogate might or might not be permitted to leave alive... in some circumstances, the surrogate might end up being a kind of foster parent as well (what vampire really wants to deal with dirty nappies?)
Probably the most convenient way to do it would be just to get a ghoul/jannisary in an IVF clinic, give a couple that looks roughly like you and the father the wrong egg, have them raise it to the appropriate age, and then swoop in and pick up your kid when they're old enough to be useful. After all, anyone who can afford IVF is probably wealthy and stable enough to provide your perfect little baby the environment they need. Bonus, do it to 10-20 families and choose the kid that you like the look of best.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a month later)
Yeah, sorry; I just connected them thematically even though the analogy isn't quite right. I tend to do that, get very excited about a link and then mis-state it to make it sound better than it is.
Okie dokie lokie.
Here I was thinking "well if the sun rules the spleen I guess we can re-work it so you stake the spleen not the heart" but no the sun rules the heart and the spine in western astrology. Almost too convenient, hey?
Don't complain too much when the world unexpectedly lines up with your worldbuilding...
Can you kill a campire with chamomile tea? All signs point to maybe. Having sunflowers be deadly seems a bit on the nose, but they are probably e.g. reagents for a sunlight spell (which definitely exists canonically)
Depending on the strength of the link, you may need to include several of those plants in the tea (and perhaps in carefully regulated ratios, too, for maximum effect).
But yeah, using sunflower seeds to power a sunlight spell seems thematically appropriate.
Here's a question: if we're going for the image of the sun, would touching a full page illustration with the tip of your finger burn you? Or would you have to stick your palm on a smaller-sized image?
Hmmmmmm. I'd say that yes, it would burn a vampire - but the image has to be complete. Ripping the page in half and then touching the same part of the image will have no effect.
(This is bad news for a vampire who does put his palm on a smaller image; because he then has a burn on his hand which is, itself, a complete image of the Sun...)
I'm imagining a young woman being turned by, say, her father or husband-to-be. She wanted nothing more in life than to bear a child, and it kind of ends up with her going a bit bonkers, trying to make it happen, and after three long centuries, conducting her own research into IVF, she has finally gotten somewhere... Damnit, I have a pregnant NPC in the nWoD RPG I'm running, still need to shoehorn something "interesting" about the pregnancy in, I'll keep that in reserve.
Have fun!
I think this is the most likely way to do it. Little fuss, little mess, almost no risk of being caught. Especially if you have a woman from say, Nepal and her family flown into Standard Western Country - a lot more monetary leverage and maybe you'll illegally get them citizenship. Win-win-win.
Yeah, there are quite a lot of problems that can be solved by application of sufficient money.
This is horrific I love it.
For the vampire without an expense account.
Did your ghoul's wife see something she shouldn't have? May as well get some use out of her before you kill her.
...ooooh, I hadn't thought of that idea.
Probably the most convenient way to do it would be just to get a ghoul/jannisary in an IVF clinic, give a couple that looks roughly like you and the father the wrong egg, have them raise it to the appropriate age, and then swoop in and pick up your kid when they're old enough to be useful. After all, anyone who can afford IVF is probably wealthy and stable enough to provide your perfect little baby the environment they need. Bonus, do it to 10-20 families and choose the kid that you like the look of best.
You don't need a wealthy family. Just pick out whichever family you want and, three months later, have them discover a "distant uncle" in Brazil who recently died and left a fortune to his closest living relatives who, due to an epidemic of something-or-other in Brazil, turns out to be the new family...
Doesn't matter that they've never heard of the uncle, all his paperwork is perfectly in order (watch it, that ink's still a bit wet).
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (a month later)
Here's a question: if we're going for the image of the sun, would touching a full page illustration with the tip of your finger burn you? Or would you have to stick your palm on a smaller-sized image?
Hmmmmmm. I'd say that yes, it would burn a vampire - but the image has to be complete. Ripping the page in half and then touching the same part of the image will have no effect.
Would it, though? Naively it seems it wouldn't, because it's not a complete image of the sun, which is what the light from the sun becomes when it hits your skin.
Then again - if a vampire gets hit by the setting sun, or the sun during a solar eclipse, the "full image" of the sun doesn't hit the vampire, does it? Just a partial image that is part of the real whole. So I guess it makes sense. Hm.
You don't need a wealthy family. Just pick out whichever family you want and, three months later, have them discover a "distant uncle" in Brazil who recently died and left a fortune to his closest living relatives
Nah, you'd want a wealthy family because they're wealthy/intelligent/stable and thus have the appropriate qualities to raise Your Special Child. For example, say you have some trailer park hillbillies - give them a few million dollars and they still might not send Your Special Child to the best private school or feed them the healthiest foods, and moreover they might just go the way of most lottery winners and end up worse off than before. Plus, if you go for a billionaire, you'll be able to have Your Special Child inherit their money in a few short decades and it'd be a pretty neat and tidy affair.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a month later)
Then again - if a vampire gets hit by the setting sun, or the sun during a solar eclipse, the "full image" of the sun doesn't hit the vampire, does it? Just a partial image that is part of the real whole. So I guess it makes sense. Hm.
Yeah... it all fits together.
Now, here's a question to consider; how much distortion can the image take before it stops being effective? How bent can a mirror be and still work?
Nah, you'd want a wealthy family because they're wealthy/intelligent/stable and thus have the appropriate qualities to raise Your Special Child. For example, say you have some trailer park hillbillies - give them a few million dollars and they still might not send Your Special Child to the best private school or feed them the healthiest foods, and moreover they might just go the way of most lottery winners and end up worse off than before.
Ah, good point - you need a family with a certain approach to wealth. You could still pick a surrogate with the right approach, but who had recently (say) been made a pauper by a bad divorce and her husband having better lawyers and then pull the "wealthy uncle" trick if necessary - or if they're about to send your child to the second-best university because they can't quite afford the very best or similar - which means that attitude towards money is more important than actual access to money.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
How much distortion can the image take before it stops being effective? How bent can a mirror be and still work?
Hmm. If I say 0, then that means a vampire can cover his house with, say, funhouse mirror type glass and it'll be fine (right? Or would the tiny images of the sun still appear?). Does light get distorted under water?
I'd want a vampire to still get burned by light going through water, and light going through any sort of clear lens. No direct sunlight, however distorted. But does that ruin things for us again???
Ah, good point - you need a family with a certain approach to wealth. You could still pick a surrogate with the right approach
Yeah; basically, choose an appropriate family, and if they'd benefit from a bit of cash then it should be pretty easy to provide it.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
Light will get distorted under water, unless the surface is perfectly smooth. Ripples, waves, splashes, will all distort things. (Such distortions will be time-varying, though - sooner or later, and probably sooner, an undistorted image will get through and hit the vampire). This would mean that going through even a thin layer of rippling water would make sunlight far less effective against vampires, but wouldn't prevent it from working altogether (it just works randomly, and only some of the time).
If I say 0, then that means a vampire can cover his house with, say, funhouse mirror type glass and it'll be fine (right? Or would the tiny images of the sun still appear?)
It might be fine, I think, as long as he distortions were complete. As long as there wasn't even a tiny bit of the glass which was flat, or which formed a non-distorting lens, or which formed a distortion that could be countered in some way (e.g. a compressed image of the Sun could become an undistorted image by landing on the vampire at the correct angle - which stretches the image).
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
OK. I can get that water / glass / etc thing I suppose. It looks like funhouse mirror type glass would just be so fabulously risky, and vampires that are old and thus most wealthy and powerful are so extremely sensitive to sunlight that they wouldn't afford to take risks.
I think I'm content with making the sunlight thing work with the image of the sun, but not officially declare it so anywhere, as I don't think a vampire touching an image of the sun will come up. I suppose it likely has come up in the past 50 years or so since we've had solar photography (.... would a black and white image work? Probably not, right?). So.... the past 20 years or so might actually be the first time that images of the sun have become dangerous. Hmm. If I decide to go full Rat!Fic that could be how Our Heroes kill the Vampire Menace; get tiny suns engraved on the tips of their arrows.
How/why do stakes work? They have to be wood. Looks like wood is an element in traditional chinese philosophy. So are fire and gold. This is... interesting and I think I'm going to try and run with it! We add earth and water to round out the set. Earth = vampire's body (flesh), which turns to dust maybe; water = blood, naturally.
Fortunately, though each element has a planet, none of them have the sun as their planet. Fire is associated with the heart though which is neat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Xing
The philosophy has two phases: generating and controlling, which are on the left and right of the table below.
Chinese Vampire Chinese Vampire Wood feeds fire; - Wood parts earth; Wood splits flesh Fire creates earth; Fire creates flesh Earth absorbs water; Flesh absorbs blood Earth bears gold; Flesh bears gold Water quenches fire; Blood quenches fire Gold collects water; Gold collects blood Fire melts gold; Fire melts gold Water nourishes wood. Blood nourishes wood Gold chops wood. Gold chops wood #Nourishing
Wood feeds fire: self explanatory.
Fire creates flesh: implies that creating a vampire involves setting something on fire. I'm OK with this. It makes reproducing a dangerous thing for a vampire to attempt.
Flesh bears gold: ??? Maybe a parable about ancient mages making gold and the sun sympathetic to each other, thus "creating" the power of gold
Gold collects(creates) blood: Gold 'hurts' a vampire by causing bruising as the flesh turns to blood, maybe?
Blood nourishes wood: Rather than creating wood, blood from a vampire's heart soaks into the stake and so is unable to power the vampire's organs, creating the torpor. This also implies that a stake is somehow empowered by the blood in some way; maybe planting a stake soaked with vampire blood will make your crops grow? Who knows.
#Destroying
Wood splits flesh: Pretty clear that the wood has a bad impact on the vampire's fleshy body due to the stake.
Flesh absorbs blood: The vampire drinks blood, to live and all.
Blood quenches fire: Not sure on this one. Perhaps this is meant literally, or, metaphorically, a vampire can survive in a fire (or sunlight, gold) as long as she can continue drinking blood?
Fire melts gold: Gold that has been burned is harmless to a vampire, perhaps; maybe flesh bears gold means that gold, once burned, is harmless, but once it touches human flesh it becomes dangerous again (too complicated. flesh means vampire in other places, why not here?)
Gold chops wood: Pretty self explanatory.
#Conclusion:
Probably most of the Wu Xing stuff can be thrown out. After all, no ancient society got it all right when it comes to magic, so why should the Chinese be any better? Things I like:
Fire creates flesh: the final step in the ritual of creating a vampire is to burn the human corpse.
Gold creates blood: a vampire is harmed by gold because it causes flesh to turn into blood, essentially it makes bruises and destroys muscle.
Blood nourishes wood: a stake sends a vampire into torpor by essentially being a giant blood sponge. This causes the stake to have some cool magic properties afterwards.
Flesh absorbs blood: vampires gotta drink blood
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
I think I'm content with making the sunlight thing work with the image of the sun, but not officially declare it so anywhere
Yeah, that's the best way to go. No-one in-universe knows that it works like that, and vampires are (for obvious reasons) not really all that involved in solar photography, so it's not likely to really come up often.
(.... would a black and white image work? Probably not, right?)
That one's entirely up to you. A greyscale image is a distortion (only of colour instead of shape) - it comes down to how accurate the colours need to be. It would make sense either way.
If I decide to go full Rat!Fic that could be how Our Heroes kill the Vampire Menace; get tiny suns engraved on the tips of their arrows.
It can work, but they have to carve really really accurately. Might be better to fold a solar photo into a paper plane and throw that... assuming that a folded image is still effective.
Or just gold-plate their arrowheads.
Wu Xing
Fire creates flesh
Fire injures vampires; it destroys flesh.
There are two things in that table that fire destroys; wood, and gold. It might make more sense to cast the vampire's flesh under 'wood'...
Gold chops wood.
What kind of gold are you using? Gold's soft. It doesn't keep an edge. Attempting to cut down a tree with a golden axe will just get you a blunt axe (assuming you can even lift the thing, gold is heavy).
...
Looking at the wiki page, it looks like the Chinese philosophy uses "metal" as a category instead of "gold" - which makes more sense here, because while gold is certainly a type of metal, most metals will chop wood.
...okay. Here's my thoughts. Mythological vampires don't just sleep in a coffin for fun, sometimes they actually recover by being buried in a grave. So "earth" already has a place in vampire mythology. As does water (especially running water...)
So. Vampires are harmed by two things in the list; fire and gold. They are put in suspended animation by one; wood. They have no negative reactions to two; water and earth.
Since the Wu Xing has this creation/destruction theme going on, it would be, well, symmetrical, if those last two items were somehow (mildly?) beneficial in some way.
Fire consumes wood; metal (gold) overcomes wood.
Wood consumes water; wood overcomes earth.
So. If we class the vampire as 'wood', what does this leave us with?
Fire consumes vampires, destroying them, leaving wounds that do not easily heal. Perhaps would that do not naturally regenerate at all.
Gold chops through vampires, perhaps slicing more easily through them, or messing (again) with their regeneration.
The effect of water counter fire - a vampire leaving a wound (or a burn) under running water may speed up (or re-start) regeneration.
The effects of earth counter gold; perhaps resting underground, in contact with earth, allows a vampire to heal faster.
As for wood - if a vampire's body is magically similar to wood, then a wooden stake through the heart will mess with the system. Probably the animating magic flows easily into the stake - because it's wood - but then never flows out again, because it's the wrong wood. It doesn't have the right channels, the right flow mechanisms.
Okay, so I just took the Wu Xing in a completely different direction to the direction you took it in.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
It might make more sense to cast the vampire's flesh under 'wood'...
But then what do we cast the stake under? Hmmm
the Chinese philosophy uses "metal" as a category instead of "gold" - which makes more sense here, because while gold is certainly a type of metal, most metals will chop wood.
Yeah, but (one of the) literal translations of the character that means "metal" - 金 - is gold, which I thought was very very cool, from a worldbuilding perspective; originally the person who actually was on the right track about gold called it gold, but then everyone else fucked around with it, added their own stuff, and eventually the fact it used the character 金 was "just a metaphor" and "they really mean any metal" and "why don't you buy my feng shui consulting service?".
So. If we class the vampire as 'wood', what does this leave us with?
- Fire consumes vampires, destroying them, leaving wounds that do not easily heal. Perhaps would that do not naturally regenerate at all.
- Gold chops through vampires, perhaps slicing more easily through them, or messing (again) with their regeneration.
- The effect of water counter fire - a vampire leaving a wound (or a burn) under running water may speed up (or re-start) regeneration.
- The effects of earth counter gold; perhaps resting underground, in contact with earth, allows a vampire to heal faster.
I like all the above, it's a pretty neat system. I'll have to work out which I prefer. I worry all the powers and counter-powers is going to get confusing, but at the same time, it's a pretty rich sort of tapestry and doesn't require much investment as it only happens at times when vampires are being torched and stuff by hunters anyway.
- As for wood - if a vampire's body is magically similar to wood, then a wooden stake through the heart will mess with the system. Probably the animating magic flows easily into the stake - because it's wood - but then never flows out again, because it's the wrong wood. It doesn't have the right channels, the right flow mechanisms.
Not sure I see this, will think about it.
Okay, so I just took the Wu Xing in a completely different direction to the direction you took it in.
Wu Xing is pretty cool isn't it? At least conceptually, it's got a lot of little things to hang hooks off of. Nice and convenient for all these different cultures to invent magic systems for us, isn't it?
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
But then what do we cast the stake under? Hmmm
Also wood! It works because it's magically similar enough to vampire flesh - it's like ramming a bit of copper through an electric circuit, it makes thing stop working because it conducts the 'electricity' in all the wrong places. (Electric circuits don't self-repair when you take the copper out, so the analogy's a bit weak).
Yeah, but (one of the) literal translations of the character that means "metal" - 金 - is gold, which I thought was very very cool, from a worldbuilding perspective;
I see. And, better yet, gold doesn't chop wood but it does chop vampires like anything, so originally calling it gold might have been a deliberate instruction for future vampire hunters.
I like all the above, it's a pretty neat system. I'll have to work out which I prefer.
Great!
I worry all the powers and counter-powers is going to get confusing, but at the same time, it's a pretty rich sort of tapestry and doesn't require much investment as it only happens at times when vampires are being torched and stuff by hunters anyway.
Yeah, a lot of this is background detail that might crop up once or twice in a story but hints at a coherent system behind everything.
Wu Xing is pretty cool isn't it? At least conceptually, it's got a lot of little things to hang hooks off of.
And, as we've conclusively proven, it's wide open enough for two people to apply it to the same fictional situation and come up with two wildly different ways to make it fit said situation. So it can probably be used to explain everything.
Which is bad science, but great for fictional worldbuilding...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
RE Gold/metal, originally originally it apparently met copper, so let's not look too closely at it.
I think I like the fire/gold damages the vampire permanently unless the vampire heals using water/earth, though I'm wondering if there's some way we can make vampires unable to cross running water, but I think that's probably getting a bit too far out there.
I think I'll keep the "fire needs to be used to create a vampire", because it makes it difficult to make new vampires, though I'm not sure how that would happen mechanically. If you threw a match at a recently dead corpse, they wouldn't catch alight, would they? Maybe you have to set the fire on the heart, or the slurry a vampire vomits into the vamp-to-be's heart is flammable and you have to light it on fire, close the chest cavity, and the heat + the slurry creates the magic. Maybe?
Will also keep gold creates blood -> gold causes vampire's flesh to turn into blood, which creates some pretty sweet gory scenes, probably.
Blood nourishes wood -> stakes soak up the blood and get all magically charged and can be used for ????.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
RE Gold/metal, originally originally it apparently met copper, so let's not look too closely at it.
Okie dokie.
I'm wondering if there's some way we can make vampires unable to cross running water, but I think that's probably getting a bit too far out there.
Easy.
A vampire can go out in the day, as long as he doesn't allow any sunlight to fall on him. So, one an imagine a rich but eccentric vampire, in very thick clothing, with an umbrella to keep the sun off his face, strolling through the countryside in the middle of the day.
He approaches a river, running water. The water gives off reflections. Sunlight - a full, undistorted image of the sun - strikes his face from a direction that the umbrella does not cover. Instant sun-injury - instant death if he's too old.
Two or three incidents like that, and a rumour goes around that vampires cannot cross running water... though in reality, running water poses no obstacle to them as long as the sun is down.
I think I'll keep the "fire needs to be used to create a vampire", because it makes it difficult to make new vampires, though I'm not sure how that would happen mechanically. If you threw a match at a recently dead corpse, they wouldn't catch alight, would they?
Hmmm. A funeral pyre needs to be a pretty big thing; so a corpse can be burned, but you need to take some effort to do it.
Maybe you need to take a torch (the flame-on-the-end-of-a-stick type, not the battery-operated type) and use it to seal the wound after the slurry is inserted into the heart. Possibly create a few ritual burns at specific locations. Hmmmm... fire is opposed to vampires, so one would expect it to hurt them... but perhaps the practical reason is that it burns away parts of the animating spell? Perhaps the original vampire enchantment was supposed to have them take no action unless explicitly ordered by a member of the right family, and these burns are basically ripping apart the parts of the enchantment that keep the new vampire's old mind sealed away?
Hmmm... and if that's the case, does the security programming revert if the wound ever heals? Do all vampires carry a burn scar on their chests that they have to take care to keep away from water? Or does the flesh heal back but leave the security programming broken?
Blood nourishes wood -> stakes soak up the blood and get all magically charged and can be used for ????.
Magic wands. In these modern days when magic is all but forgotten, a blood-soaked stake is one of the few things that can act as a magic battery, quite beneficial to a mage who has some idea of how to use it (or even just one who has used too much magic and wants to use more)
u/None [+1] (2 months later)
[removed]
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
That said, the 'just so' story doesn't explain why it's running water - you'd imagine still water would be worse, because it can be perfectly reflective.
Perfectly flat water is only dangerous from one direction - if the vampire and the sun are both to the east of the lake, then there are no dangerous reflections to worry about. (Well, not until some idiot throws a stone into the lake and causes ripples, anyway).
But that doesn't really matter - a superstition will often have a lot of unnecessary details attached. Consider the matter of vampire stakes, for example; a lot of traditions say that it matters what type of wood you use.
To quote from the Wikipedia article:
Methods of destroying suspected vampires varied, with staking the most commonly cited method, particularly in southern Slavic cultures.[46] Ash was the preferred wood in Russia and the Baltic states,[47] or hawthorn in Serbia,[48] with a record of oak in Silesia.[49] Aspen was also the wood of choice for stakes, as it was believed that Christ's cross was made from aspen (aspen branches on the graves of purported vampires were also believed to prevent their risings at night).[50] Potential vampires were most often staked through the heart, though the mouth was targeted in Russia and northern Germany[51][52] and the stomach in north-eastern Serbia.[53]
So, yeah, superstitions acquire unnecessary details all the time. (Why a black cat?)
Not sure about how to incorporate fire into the vampire creation ritual. All your ideas are great, though I don't want to get too complicated by having a vampire die or become an automaton if she ever gets wet.
Eh, the security program could be non-self-repairing if properly destroyed while creating the new vampire.
...maybe the ritual, done properly, makes the vampire's system think that the burn wounds are "supposed" to be there, and so the body regenerates with the burns if injured. (I just like the idea of every vampire having a very visible scar if you know where to look - somewhere that's easily hidden by clothing, so it doesn't stop them pretending to be human, but it kind of feeds into the idea of vampires being a twisted unnatural mockery of life, which is always going to be part of the undercurrent of a vampire story)
Not sure if this will help any, but here's the description of the ritual (it's a bit incomplete).
Hmmm. So, basically, sludge and readings in Latin. And it's known to not always work... interesting. I wonder why not? Perhaps there are some requirements to the vampire ritual that the vampires themselves have forgotten (something not hard to get right accidentally, but also not 100% certain - perhaps it requires a very specific range of air temperatures, or doesn't work if the humidity is too high, or something). Or perhaps there's something about certain people - it may be that the magic genes prevent vampirasation, or are required for it.
Completely changing the subject, I was having a discussion with my rolepalying partner last night about whether it was appropriate to have mages in fiction be able to, for example, remove traumatic memories so that way kids can grow up without the baggage from those.
Hmmmm. Well, I see no reason not to have it, if it's handled properly. I mean, some mental disorders can be handled by means of chemistry, so why not by means of magic? Magic should be a tool - it has uses, it makes some things easier, but above all it needs to be used by someone who knows exactly what they're doing.
Having said that, I don't think it should just be a matter of waving a magic wand and all is well. There should be drawbacks and tradeoffs. Some examples might include:
Memories are intertwined; they connect, and you may remember thinking about a memory, or remember a time when a memory helped you make a decision. Either the memory erasure spell wipes all associated memories as well (and thus using it on a sixty-year-old to erase a childhood trauma that's continually affected him may leave him a drooling idiot). This type of amnesia spell can still be safely used immediately on a person to deal with a traumatic memory that happened ten minutes ago - or three days ago, at the cost of wiping all memories of the last three days.
The spell removes the memory, but does nothing for the brain chemistry. The patient remains fearful and traumatised, but can no longer remember why. Some patients recover naturally at this point; others descend into paranoia and, in extreme cases, insanity; this is more likely if the patient finds something that proves him memories have been erased (e.g. he looks over his diary, or, worse, he realises that his diary has been deliberately removed) and less likely if the original trauma was less severe.
The memories are removed - and so are any lessons that may have been learned from them. The patient them happily goes off and gets himself straight into the same situation all over again - or at least a similar situation. The trauma hits harder with each successive event, because every time there's a little bit of trauma that the spell doesn't quite remove, and it builds up with repeated exposures.
The spell doesn't remove the memories, merely hiding them from the conscious mind. Over time, the memories slowly seep back - mainly in dreams - and eventually (slowly) return completely. This type of memory spell would be best used in combination with conventional therapy, to ease the impact of the trauma - it's still there, it just doesn't hit as hard as it otherwise would.
A common thread in all of the above is that, if you just throw it about at random, you can do more harm than good. But, at the same time, if you are, or work with a competent psychologist, the magic can be used to complement a more traditional means of dealing with trauma... it's not going to solve everything with the wave of a wand, but it can make everything a lot easier (or, in some cases, possible at all) to solve if used correctly.
Like it's just a hair below "and then the super mage cast a spell that removed racism, sexism and homophobia from the world forever"
...that one's straight up mind control. The super mage may have had good intentions, but he's sitting right on top of a giant heap of "absolute power corrupts absolutely".
He'll probably still have good intentions when he casts a spell to make people obey the laws.
And he'll probably still have good intentions when he casts a spell to make people say "please" and "thank you" when appropriate. Or donate one-tenth of their income to various charities.
Will he notice the point at which the planet Earth is no longer populated by anyone with the ability to make their own decisions?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
Perfectly flat water is only dangerous from one direction
Ohhh, right. You have still lake water and you can see the perfect reflection of the trees at the other side of the lake but you can't see the sun unless the angle's right.
Had a discussion with my boyfriend about how the vampire "mind control" power worked, trying to make sure it wasn't too exploitable. I figure it's basically the same level of motivation as having a gun to your head - so you could have someone do almost anything, but, for example, if you asked a loving father to kill his daughter, he might be strong enough to resist you. The effect lasts somewhere between one and five minutes, so you can't have someone attempt something complicated for you, and it only makes the person really genuinely want to do what you've asked, so for example if a vampire ordered a person with OCD not to have intrusive thoughts, they would fail; but if the same OCD person was ordered to double numbers in their head, they'd happily sit there doubling numbers in their head for a full five minutes and probably not have any intrusive thoughts in that time.
The person remembers what they did, but aren't horrified by it. You could order a person with OCD to touch a filthy table, and then five minutes later say "how do you feel about touching filthy tables?", "oh no that's horrible", "but i saw you do it five minutes ago", "yeah but it felt right then/Vlad told me to do it and I trust Vlad/it seemed like a good idea at the time but I would never do it again".
So, say you order a loving father to kill a hooded figure; turns out the hooded figure is his daughter and he doesn't realise until he's chopped her head off. He would justify that as killing the hooded figure seemed like a good idea at the time, but it totally ruined him when he realised it was actually his daughter.
That sort of thing. Doesn't change peoples' minds (with OCD, for example, just having someone experience that they don't die of SARS after touching a toilet seat can really help them recover), but lets vampires order people to do stuff and get away with it.
(I just like the idea of every vampire having a very visible scar if you know where to look - somewhere that's easily hidden by clothing, so it doesn't stop them pretending to be human, but it kind of feeds into the idea of vampires being a twisted unnatural mockery of life, which is always going to be part of the undercurrent of a vampire story)
Yeah. I'm not sure what sort of themes I'm looking to explore with vampires. It's probably more in line with the standard Supernatural Romance tropes; they're sexy and other and dangerous and wise, rather than being tortured creatures, though they kind of are.
Hmmm. So, basically, sludge and readings in Latin.
The readings in Latin are entirely the christian burial service that William is putting in because he's a religious guy. (Also because when he had it done to him thousands of years ago, he insisted on all that sort of stuff because he was worried about his immortal soul.) The only important part is really the sludge and closing the body up afterwards, so it can heal back together in one piece. That's why I'm thinking incorporating the fire would make things more interesting, as at the moment it's not clear exactly what's required.
And it's known to not always work... interesting. I wonder why not? Perhaps there are some requirements to the vampire ritual that the vampires themselves have forgotten (something not hard to get right accidentally, but also not 100% certain - perhaps it requires a very specific range of air temperatures, or doesn't work if the humidity is too high, or something). Or perhaps there's something about certain people - it may be that the magic genes prevent vampirasation, or are required for it.
In my head it was a combination of the time after death/the amount of sludge/the potency of the sludge/how intact the heart was, but I think a genetic component is also a great idea. Of course there's no doubt magic spells that prevent the magic reanimating a vampire from taking root in the area of effect.
Having said that, I don't think it should just be a matter of waving a magic wand and all is well. There should be drawbacks and tradeoffs.
Thanks for that. I think the drawbacks and tradeoffs were the things that were actually bothering me, since that's the way of, well, life. I'd also imagine you'd need a mage who was not only a one in a billion level mage, but a neurologist, to be able to do the sorts of things we're talking about. After all, if you can fix the brain with surgery then a neurologist mage can just as easily kill the improper bits of grey matter and pull them out through the nose. However fucking around with serotonin reuptake would require near constant awareness of the subatomic state of the brain, which would be very complicated, and we have no idea how memories are stored so how would a mage be able to begin to take effect iwth it?
- Memories are intertwined;
- The memories are removed
My boyfriend proposed a spell that removes the emotional component of the memory. So you still remember the bad stranger in the white van, but the memory doesn't cause you negative emotions. (I think another reason I had such a problem with the idea is I was imagining a parallel version of me that had her memory of abuse erased, who would completely happily spend time with her abuser and let children in her care spend time alone with them, and that made my skin crawl because it would mean I would still have happened but I couldn't have learned from it)
- The spell doesn't remove the memories, merely hiding them from the conscious mind. Over time, the memories slowly seep back - mainly in dreams - and eventually (slowly) return completely.
That's nasty. Eeep!
If you are, or work with a competent psychologist, the magic can be used to complement a more traditional means of dealing with trauma... it's not going to solve everything with the wave of a wand, but it can make everything a lot easier (or, in some cases, possible at all) to solve if used correctly.
Yeah. The reason I got onto vampire mind control is I was asking my boyfriend (severe OCD, hence all the OCD examples) about the issue and he was pointing out to me how a vampire could force people into therapy and give them effective therapy and wasn't that a problem too? I said vampires could force people to have sex with them and that doesn't mean I condone rape. Basically, the author is responsible for what the system allows, but characters are responsible for their actions. Though having a system that allows vampires to rape people is.... not great, but as an author one can choose not to highlight that part of the world.
Will [the super mage who casts lots of spells] notice the point at which the planet Earth is no longer populated by anyone with the ability to make their own decisions?
Yeah. That's a problem you always end up with. I guess at the end of the day effecting neurons on a grand scale is a lot harder than making sunlight appear from nothing or a force bolt strike someone's brain.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
Had a discussion with my boyfriend about how the vampire "mind control" power worked, trying to make sure it wasn't too exploitable.
Great!
Now let me see how I can exploit it.
The person remembers what they did, but aren't horrified by it.
Ooooooooh, now this is exploitable.
Let's consider Sam. Sam has a daughter, Sally, who he loves with all his heart.
Let's consider a vampire, Vlad. For complex reasons outside of the scope of this example, Vlad wants Sam to kill Sally. The simple way to do this would be to put a hood on Sally... but no, Vlad wants Sam to knowingly kill Sally.
So. First thing Vlad does, he controls Sam, and asks him to spend five minutes imagining why it would be a good thing to kill Sally. Sam does so (since it doesn't involve actual harm to anyone), and, this is important, he is not horrified by the idea that he just spent five minutes thinking about why it was a good idea to kill his daughter.
In fact, he'll make excuses to himself why it's acceptable to do so. "I didn't actually do anything," he'll tell himself. "I just thought about it. As a hypothetical situation."
Next day, Vlad controls Sam again, and asks him to describe circumstances that would lead to him killing his daughter. Sam suggests the possibility that he might shoot someone he thought was a stranger breaking into his house, only to find afterwards that it was his daughter - Vlad shakes his head, and asks Sam under what circumstances he would knowingly kill Sally. Sam's at a loss, but he tries to come up with something - anything - that might satisfy Vlad's question. Maybe - maybe if it was necessary to save an entire city of people?
Next day, Vlad goes to Sally. He gives Sally some item of value (e.g. her mother's wedding ring) and Controls her. He tells her to sell the ring to his jannissary standing right over there in exchange for drugs, which she will hide in her room. Because of the Control, she thinks this is a great idea and does so. (She doesn't take the drugs because (a) she is not stupid and (b) Vlad didn't tell her to do so).
It doesn't take Sam long to find out (Vlad will point him in the right direction if necessary) that his daughter sold her mother's wedding ring for drugs. (Doesn't matter that the bag of white powder is really cake flour). Now there's a definite rift between Sam and Sally. And, every day, Sam is being Controlled and asked to spend five minutes imagining the benefits of killing Sally.
In fact, just to desensitise Sam further, he might Control Sam and get Sam to kill a few total strangers - starting with borderline suicidal people who have been Controlled into begging to be killed and working up from there - just so that Sam is less horrified at the idea of murder at all.
...he still wouldn't do it on his own, but how long will it be until the rift between Sam and Sally is wide enough that Sam can be Controlled into killing Sally?
Okay, that's one way to get around the "he would never do that" problem. Now, second exploit - how to make someone do something both complex and long-term?
Easy solution. Control their boss. When Mr. Smith tells Tom from accounting to prepare an extremely complicated fifty-page spreadsheet and not ask questions, then Tom does it because he doesn't want to be fired - and Vlad only needed to Control Mr. Smith for one to five minutes.
Yeah. I'm not sure what sort of themes I'm looking to explore with vampires. It's probably more in line with the standard Supernatural Romance tropes; they're sexy and other and dangerous and wise, rather than being tortured creatures, though they kind of are.
Eh, fair enough.
The readings in Latin are entirely the christian burial service that William is putting in because he's a religious guy. (Also because when he had it done to him thousands of years ago, he insisted on all that sort of stuff because he was worried about his immortal soul.) The only important part is really the sludge and closing the body up afterwards, so it can heal back together in one piece. That's why I'm thinking incorporating the fire would make things more interesting, as at the moment it's not clear exactly what's required.
Hmmmm. Even if there's no scar left afterwards, the only place I can see fire fitting into that ritual is to cauterise the wound when it's done.
Wait... that, or the sludge has to be vomited into a bowl and then boiled before being added.
Of course there's no doubt magic spells that prevent the magic reanimating a vampire from taking root in the area of effect.
Of course. It might not even be the original purpose of the spell - a spell that causes (say) the smell of chamomile might just interfere with the nascent vampire's energies in just the wrong way.
I think the drawbacks and tradeoffs were the things that were actually bothering me, since that's the way of, well, life.
Makes sense.
I'd also imagine you'd need a mage who was not only a one in a billion level mage, but a neurologist, to be able to do the sorts of things we're talking about
Definitely a neurologist, but he might not need to be a one-in-a-billion level mage. I mean, how much magic force does it really take to nudge a neuron? (It takes a ton of precision, of course, so he'd need to be a seriously well-practiced mage, if if he doesn't have much magical muscle).
we have no idea how memories are stored so how would a mage be able to begin to take effect iwth it?
Magic has to follow rules, but it doesn't have to follow the same rules as everything else. And magic often works with high-level concepts.
Consider Sleeping Beauty. Magic puts her to sleep until such time as "true love's kiss" wakes her up. But how do we define "true love's kiss"? This is a high-level concept, which we can't translate in terms of neurons.
Or the idea that an inhabited structure prevents an uninvited vampire's entry. The idea of a structure makes sense, and so does the idea of an inhabited structure - but not so much on the atomic level. It's a high-level concept, but it works with magic.
So, I see no reason why magic wouldn't work with the high-level concept of memories. It just has to do so in a consistent, rule-based way.
My boyfriend proposed a spell that removes the emotional component of the memory. So you still remember the bad stranger in the white van, but the memory doesn't cause you negative emotions.
Yeah. That could also work.
...you don't want to remove all negative emotions, though, because that leads to the horror story where the victim sees noting wrong in repeating the nightmare. Maybe just remove 90% of the negative emotions, to make it easier to deal with but still leave it as something to avoid.
That's nasty. Eeep!
It is, rather. I was thinking it would be a bit like the difference between dropping an anvil on someone versus dropping books one by on until he's carrying an anvil worth of weight - the eventual impact is equally large, but in the second case you've got a bit of time to adjust to the weight and not get crushed instantly.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
Now let me see how I can exploit it.
I am so happy to read you type those words.
The person remembers what they did, but aren't horrified by it.
He'll make excuses to himself why it's acceptable to imagine killing his daughter. "I didn't actually do anything," he'll tell himself. "I just thought about it. As a hypothetical situation."
I would have conceptualised it more as, he would still think imagining killing his daughter would be just as bad as he did before he did the imagining. Like, the fact he did the action has no bearing whatsoever on how he feels about it. Just like someone with OCD doesn't get "accidental therapy" from deciding that touching greasy tables is not going to cause the apocalypse, his attitude towards imagining killing his daughter is just as negative as it was before. The same way that, say, if he was drunk and hit his daughter for misbehaving (something he'd never do sober), when he was sober he'd look back on it and go "omg, never again", until he inevitably gets drunk again and hits her again.
Next day, Vlad goes to Sally. He gives Sally some item of value (e.g. her mother's wedding ring) and Controls her. He tells her to sell the ring to his jannissary standing right over there in exchange for drugs, which she will hide in her room.
Yeah, a vampire could definitely manipulate family members to kill each other. You could make a loving husband kill his wife by controlling her and getting her to have sex with a jannisary at the exact moment that Sam is looking through the window.
And, every day, Sam is being Controlled and asked to spend five minutes imagining the benefits of killing Sally.
In fact, just to desensitise Sam further, he might Control Sam and get Sam to kill a few total strangers - starting with borderline suicidal people who have been Controlled into begging to be killed and working up from there - just so that Sam is less horrified at the idea of murder at all.
...he still wouldn't do it on his own, but how long will it be until the rift between Sam and Sally is wide enough that Sam can be Controlled into killing Sally?
I definitely concede that you can have a loving father kill his daughter through mind control, even if it requires waiting a few weeks/months to get the gap wide enough. I don't think there's a huge issue with this exploit because e.g. a semi-loving father could be controlled into killing his daughter with no problem.
Now, second exploit - how to make someone do something both complex and long-term?
Easy solution. Control their boss.
Sounds like a perfect option. You'd probably need to control the boss semi-regularly (i.e. once a week have Mr Smith say "How is that money laundering project going?") so that way Tom doesn't move onto other priorities, or, worst of all, Tom doesn't say "Hey Mr Smith, that money laundering project, can I take time off my TPS reports to finish it up because it's taking a while?" and then Mr Smith would inevitably reply "Oh, no, it seemed really important at the time but just shelve it for now, the TPS reports should be your priority."
Yeah. I'm not sure what sort of themes I'm looking to explore with vampires. It's probably more in line with the standard Supernatural Romance tropes; they're sexy and other and dangerous and wise, rather than being tortured creatures, though they kind of are.
Eh, fair enough.
Yeah. It's kind of embarrassing that I'm trying to rationalify (somewhat) something that is essentially a Twilight/50 Shades level of prestige. It's really "yaoi vampires kissing a lot", but hey, romance novels are very popular so why the hell should I be ashamed if that's my genre, and we won't be talking about quivering members.
Hmmmm. Even if there's no scar left afterwards, the only place I can see fire fitting into that ritual is to cauterise the wound when it's done.
Hmm. I had William wrap Red in cloth; being wrapped tightly in flammable cloth which is then set alight could be part of the ritual (and make it pretty risky and impossible to do covertly), though not really sure of an in-universe explanation for that.
Cauterising the wound or setting a fire inside the body would make more sense.
Boiling the sludge is also a good idea but I just like the mental image of a vampire throwing up directly into their target's heart (it's totally disgusting).
Of course. It might not even be the original purpose of the spell - a spell that causes (say) the smell of chamomile might just interfere with the nascent vampire's energies in just the wrong way.
Oh goodie. I wonder what another major (or minor) magical / superstitious belief system is, that could get me thinking about that. I do like the idea of a smell interfering somehow. Indian is another big one, but I'm sure there's plenty of places in Africa and the Americas and Oceania too.
It could also be something specific about the "energy" of the place, though that might end up too much with feng shui and I want to stay away from Chinese now we've already stolen from it.
we have no idea how memories are stored so how would a mage be able to begin to take effect iwth it?
Magic has to follow rules, but it doesn't have to follow the same rules as everything else. And magic often works with high-level concepts.
Or the idea that an inhabited structure prevents an uninvited vampire's entry. The idea of a structure makes sense, and so does the idea of an inhabited structure - but not so much on the atomic level. It's a high-level concept, but it works with magic.
So, I see no reason why magic wouldn't work with the high-level concept of memories. It just has to do so in a consistent, rule-based way.
Ooooh you got me there. Yeah. I don't like it but you're right.
...you don't want to remove all negative emotions, though, because that leads to the horror story where the victim sees noting wrong in repeating the nightmare. Maybe just remove 90% of the negative emotions, to make it easier to deal with but still leave it as something to avoid.
No, you can remove the negative emotions entirely and the person can rationally understand that strangers in white vans are very bad, assuming they're old enough. Sure, some people have to touch "wet paint" when they see a wet paint sign, but if you go to a mage to have a traumatic memory removed, the mage might say "ok, I am removing the emotion of you not liking what happened in the white van. Just remember that white vans are bad places to be, the things that happened were bad, and you should not let them happen again".
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
I am so happy to read you type those words.
I would have conceptualised it more as, he would still think imagining killing his daughter would be just as bad as he did before he did the imagining. Like, the fact he did the action has no bearing whatsoever on how he feels about it.
...ah. I thought that not being horrified about having done it would generalise into a sort of gradual desensitisation.
But fair enough, I take your point regarding the drunk father.
I definitely concede that you can have a loving father kill his daughter through mind control, even if it requires waiting a few weeks/months to get the gap wide enough. I don't think there's a huge issue with this exploit because e.g. a semi-loving father could be controlled into killing his daughter with no problem.
Yeah, but it can be generalised further. Anything that someone would never do, even under Control, then becomes a matter of the vampire just setting up the right scenes for a while beforehand - it weakens from "he'd never do that" to "you have to plan ahead to make him do that".
Or, of course, just buy a hooded cloak and make the daughter wear that.
Sounds like a perfect option. You'd probably need to control the boss semi-regularly
That's reasonable, yes.
Hmm. I had William wrap Red in cloth; being wrapped tightly in flammable cloth which is then set alight could be part of the ritual (and make it pretty risky and impossible to do covertly), though not really sure of an in-universe explanation for that.
...yeah, given how lethal fire is for vampires, I'm not seeing an in-universe explanation for this one, either. Especially as I'm pretty sure that if you get all the cloth on fire, you'll end up with a lot more ash than corpse out of it.
Oh goodie. I wonder what another major (or minor) magical / superstitious belief system is, that could get me thinking about that. I do like the idea of a smell interfering somehow. Indian is another big one, but I'm sure there's plenty of places in Africa and the Americas and Oceania too.
...I think Africa is more likely to give you other creatures to live in the alternate universe than vampire lore. Hmmm. Though the Sun will naturally take a major part in any mythological tradition, won't it?
No, you can remove the negative emotions entirely and the person can rationally understand that strangers in white vans are very bad, assuming they're old enough. Sure, some people have to touch "wet paint" when they see a wet paint sign, but if you go to a mage to have a traumatic memory removed, the mage might say "ok, I am removing the emotion of you not liking what happened in the white van. Just remember that white vans are bad places to be, the things that happened were bad, and you should not let them happen again".
Okay, fair enough, but the rational and emotional work on different levels. The emotional revulsion pulls you out immediately, before you even realise what's going on - the rational level only works when you have time (and take the time) to think about it. So it's slower and doesn't sprig to mind as readily.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
...ah. I thought that not being horrified about having done it would generalise into a sort of gradual desensitisation.
That's the problem, it makes logical sense for it to work that way too. In the end, I guess it doesn't really matter, because nobody will ever see it. But then you end up with things being too easy for an immortal demon with super strength, super speed, transformation capabilities and mind control.
Yeah, but it can be generalised further. Anything that someone would never do, even under Control, then becomes a matter of the vampire just setting up the right scenes for a while beforehand - it weakens from "he'd never do that" to "you have to plan ahead to make him do that".
Yeah, but making characters plan ahead when any step in the plan not going well could result in the whole thing coming tumbling very amusingly/horrifically down is awesome. A sufficiently motivated person can probably manipulate almost anything to happen anyway, especially with super speed, never mind mind control.
...yeah, given how lethal fire is for vampires, I'm not seeing an in-universe explanation for this one, either. Especially as I'm pretty sure that if you get all the cloth on fire, you'll end up with a lot more ash than corpse out of it.
Yeah. sigh. Better to leave the vampire ritual vague, and try and think of something that could be done to improve it. Then again, vomiting vampire tummy sludge into a heart and then sewing the whole mess closed isn't exactly minimalist, so it might not need to be changed.
Oh goodie. I wonder what another major (or minor) magical / superstitious belief system is, that could get me thinking about that. I do like the idea of a smell interfering somehow. Indian is another big one, but I'm sure there's plenty of places in Africa and the Americas and Oceania too.
...I think Africa is more likely to give you other creatures to live in the alternate universe than vampire lore. Hmmm. Though the Sun will naturally take a major part in any mythological tradition, won't it?
Yeah, ancient egyptian having the sun pulled along the sky by a dung beatle or whatever. Maybe vampires don't like beetles? Haha. Would feel kind of gimmicky going to ancient egypt a lot though, but I'm not sure if there'd be easy ways to find say the lore of the Samburu tribe online without potentially sifting through academic papers.
The mage might say "ok, I am removing the emotion of you not liking what happened in the white van. Just remember that white vans are bad places to be, the things that happened were bad, and you should not let them happen again".
Okay, fair enough, but the rational and emotional work on different levels. The emotional revulsion pulls you out immediately, before you even realise what's going on - the rational level only works when you have time (and take the time) to think about it. So it's slower and doesn't sprig to mind as readily.
You've got a point there. I think there's a Simpson's episode where Homer takes ages to realise he was being mugged or something, because of how stupid he is? Hopefully feeling danger in non-traumatic situations would help the hypothetical person. Or not, and they'll end up constantly going into white vans with badness resulting.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
But then you end up with things being too easy for an immortal demon with super strength, super speed, transformation capabilities and mind control.
...you just need to push up the challenges to suit, then. Better equipped (and informed) vampire hunters. Other types of demons with their own magical abilities. Some of these being near indistinguishable from humans at first sight but immune to vampire mind control.
Maybe the vampire hunters have anti-mind-control contact lenses. Maybe blind people, or people with the right minor magic gene, are just plain immune.
Yeah, but making characters plan ahead when any step in the plan not going well could result in the whole thing coming tumbling very amusingly/horrifically down is awesome.
Fair enough.
A sufficiently motivated person can probably manipulate almost anything to happen anyway, especially with super speed, never mind mind control.
I guess...
Yeah. sigh. Better to leave the vampire ritual vague, and try and think of something that could be done to improve it. Then again, vomiting vampire tummy sludge into a heart and then sewing the whole mess closed isn't exactly minimalist, so it might not need to be changed.
Yeah, it makes a reasonable vampirisation ritual as-is.
Yeah, ancient egyptian having the sun pulled along the sky by a dung beatle or whatever. Maybe vampires don't like beetles? Haha.
Nah, they don't like dung. (Doesn't hurt them, they just tend to be neatness freaks).
I'm not sure if there'd be easy ways to find say the lore of the Samburu tribe online without potentially sifting through academic papers.
Just google "Samburu legends". (First link's a PDF - I didn't download it, but it looks full of legends).
You've got a point there. ... Hopefully feeling danger in non-traumatic situations would help the hypothetical person. Or not, and they'll end up constantly going into white vans with badness resulting.
Yeah, you'd want to push the emotional content low enough that there's no trauma, but leave it high enough that white vans still trigger a fear response (at least enough to force the patient to think twice before entering one - once the patient is forced to think about it, you can probably trust the rational danger-avoidance mechanism)
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
Maybe the vampire hunters have anti-mind-control contact lenses. Maybe blind people, or people with the right minor magic gene, are just plain immune.
Anti-mind-control contact lenses is a trope, but it's a good one that makes sense especially if eye contact is a requirement. I did have a character wear sunglasses to a meeting with a vampire, but was vague about whether it would actually have done anything since the vampire wasn't going to try anything (she was an emissary for an android that, through a series of hilarious misunderstandings, the vampire thought was an even more powerful vampire - one who could eat and go out in the sun, oh my! - so he didn't want to do anything to piss the uberVamp off).
I was thinking sunglasses might be a good compromise (between completely neutering a vampire's powers and being incognito about it), but then again, there's no reason anything to do with sunglasses can't be replicated by contact lenses, so it's kind of out.
My original character that I made at age ~13 for my vampire hunter included purple eyes (that's on a mary-sue checklist somewhere), so it'd also be a nice nod to her history as a character to give her a particular affinity for putting purple ones in. She's a police officer though so I'm sure she probably wouldn't be allowed to wear unnaturally coloured ones at work.
Yeah, ancient egyptian having the sun pulled along the sky by a dung beatle or whatever. Maybe vampires don't like beetles? Haha.
Nah, they don't like dung. (Doesn't hurt them, they just tend to be neatness freaks).
Vampires as having a sort of OCD is pretty common in folklore after all (counting knots, etc)
I'm not sure if there'd be easy ways to find say the lore of the Samburu tribe online without potentially sifting through academic papers.
Just google "Samburu legends". (First link's a PDF - I didn't download it, but it looks full of legends).
Well watch me eat my words. I suppose the Samburu tribe is pretty big, well-known, and well-studied, right? (I only know the name because they used it as a tribe name in Survivor: Africa (which was filmed in Kenya, because Africa Is One Place)).
I'll have to have a look through all that. I'm a big fan of the TV show survivor so using Samburu folklore would be a fun little nod.
Yeah, you'd want to push the emotional content low enough that there's no trauma, but leave it high enough that white vans still trigger a fear response.
Man, the first few psychological manipulations a psychologist mage tries are going to end up raw AF, it's kind of horrifying and I kind of want to explore it. I suppose they'd start with people who are so unbelievably fucked up from trauma that it would be hard to make it worse.
Damnit, all this world-building is making me really want to hardcore explore all these elements. It's going to go from Twilight 2.0 to Harry Potter 2.0 or something, only with lots more smooching. And with an entire probably rather interesting ancient war between magical superpowers that created sentient beings out of corpses to use as weapons, but let's ignore all that, this vampire is falling in love with an American soldier...
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
Anti-mind-control contact lenses is a trope, but it's a good one that makes sense especially if eye contact is a requirement.
Yeah... tropes often gain that status because they make sense. They're the tools in a writer's toolbox, the hammers and screwdrivers and spanners with which we construct our fictional worlds. As long as we avoid trying to use the screwdriver to hammer in a nail, we should be okay...
I did have a character wear sunglasses to a meeting with a vampire, but was vague about whether it would actually have done anything
Often the best way to present something; it keeps the reader guessing until it actually comes to crunch time. (I know that, in Artemis Fowl, the titular character used a pair of mirrored sunglasses to defeat the fairy's mesmer ability, which explicitly worked on eye contact).
she was an emissary for an android that, through a series of hilarious misunderstandings, the vampire thought was an even more powerful vampire
Ooooooh. Yeah, I can see that happening - androids are just as non-living as vampires, near-immortal with proper repair, often equally fast, and far superior in their ability to handle gold and walk in sunlight.
My original character that I made at age ~13 for my vampire hunter included purple eyes (that's on a mary-sue checklist somewhere), so it'd also be a nice nod to her history as a character to give her a particular affinity for putting purple ones in. She's a police officer though so I'm sure she probably wouldn't be allowed to wear unnaturally coloured ones at work.
It might simply be a case of "technically not allowed, but the Captain has to notice it first" - and the Captain's ability to officially Notice it is inversely proportional to how much favour she has at the time. When she's just completed a case and got some robber in court, she can have purple and gold eyes and the Captain won't say a word - when she's just messed up and that Captain's coming by to yell at her, he'll yell harder because her eyes aren't blue.
Vampires as having a sort of OCD is pretty common in folklore after all (counting knots, etc)
Eeyup.
Well watch me eat my words. I suppose the Samburu tribe is pretty big, well-known, and well-studied, right? (I only know the name because they used it as a tribe name in Survivor: Africa (which was filmed in Kenya, because Africa Is One Place)).
I wouldn't know. I hadn't even heard of the Samburu before you mentioned them, and I live in Africa.
...admittedly, I don't live anywhere near Kenya.
Man, the first few psychological manipulations a psychologist mage tries are going to end up raw AF, it's kind of horrifying and I kind of want to explore it
Isn't that also true of the first few patients of any psychologist, though? Everyone will mess up on their early attempts. (They might practice in harmless ways at first, like trying to eliminate the emotional component from a volunteer's memory of the taste of liver or something like that).
It's going to go from Twilight 2.0 to Harry Potter 2.0 or something, only with lots more smooching. And with an entire probably rather interesting ancient war between magical superpowers that created sentient beings out of corpses to use as weapons, but let's ignore all that, this vampire is falling in love with an American soldier...
...it leaves room for things to explore in the sequels. And prequels. And so on.
This is why some authors set a dozen or so books in the same universe.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
Anti-mind-control contact lenses is a trope, but it's a good one that makes sense especially if eye contact is a requirement.
Yeah... tropes often gain that status because they make sense.
OK. I am putting in that any sort of barrier to direct eye contact negates the orders, including ordinary corrective lenses or those stylish clear glasses that hipsters wear these days. Really makes life hard for a vampire if all someone needs to do to stop you controlling them is to put on a cheap pair of reading glasses.
she was an emissary for an android that, through a series of hilarious misunderstandings, the vampire thought was an even more powerful vampire
Ooooooh. Yeah, I can see that happening - androids are just as non-living as vampires, near-immortal with proper repair, often equally fast, and far superior in their ability to handle gold and walk in sunlight.
Yep. At the time it was written, it was silver not gold, and one of the gifts that the vampire gave to the robot to welcome her to the town was an aluminium necklace studded with jewels - since aluminium used to be more valuable than gold, making it an appropriate gift. The vampire hunter was poking through her things and saw a necklace that looked silver but wasn't silver, further cementing the idea that this android was a vampire who was hiding it with "fake" silver jewelry.
What really happened was the android's lawyer - a werewolf - noticed that the town's big cheese vampire was assuming she was a more powerful vampire and naturally decided that it would be great leverage for her client.
She's a police officer though so I'm sure she probably wouldn't be allowed to wear unnaturally coloured ones at work.
It might simply be a case of "technically not allowed, but the Captain has to notice it first" - and the Captain's ability to officially Notice it is inversely proportional to how much favour she has at the time. When she's just completed a case and got some robber in court, she can have purple and gold eyes and the Captain won't say a word - when she's just messed up and that Captain's coming by to yell at her, he'll yell harder because her eyes aren't blue.
I'm trying to work out, canonically, how good she is at her actual job. She seems to spend a lot of time hunting vampires and such, and she picks up leads from her job (e.g. "bar brawl" was really a vampire wrecking shit up). She also probably snoops around files she's not technically meant to be looking at. Would she be the rogue police officer who is forever skirting the lines of what is acceptable behaviour? Or would her hard working, high achieving attitude that resulted in her deciding to rid Our Town of the supernatural menace once and for all give her the skills it takes to shine? Would she regularly get supernatural creatures to turn themselves in, in exchange for brownie points (after all, a vampire doing 5 years in prison with appropriate accommodations is not the biggest sacrifice)?
Well watch me eat my words. I suppose the Samburu tribe is pretty big, well-known, and well-studied, right? (I only know the name because they used it as a tribe name in Survivor: Africa (which was filmed in Kenya, because Africa Is One Place)).
I wouldn't know. I hadn't even heard of the Samburu before you mentioned them, and I live in Africa.
...admittedly, I don't live anywhere near Kenya.
Ha, cool. Where abouts? (If you didn't work backwards from my antipode, I'm in Western Australia)
A year ago I started trying to memorise all the countries and flags of the world, but I'm quite behind at it. I do love that mozambique has an AK-47 on its flag. Makes Saudi Arabia's sword look old fashioned.
Survivor has also filmed in Gabon (S19), which looked much nicer (all foresty) than the desolate savannah-type place in Kenya they filmed S2.
Man, the first few psychological manipulations a psychologist mage tries are going to end up raw AF, it's kind of horrifying and I kind of want to explore it
Isn't that also true of the first few patients of any psychologist, though? Everyone will mess up on their early attempts. (They might practice in harmless ways at first, like trying to eliminate the emotional component from a volunteer's memory of the taste of liver or something like that).
Is it? I should ask. My boyfriend is about to do his phD/Masters (combined programme) in psychology, he would probably know this stuff.
with an entire probably rather interesting ancient war between magical superpowers that created sentient beings out of corpses to use as weapons, but let's ignore all that, this vampire is falling in love with an American soldier...
...it leaves room for things to explore in the sequels. And prequels. And so on.
This is why some authors set a dozen or so books in the same universe.
Yeah. This might end up happening, especially if it's a roleplaying universe and we continue to do ~150 pages per year as seems to be our rate now we're grown ups with jobs and all that. (When we were 15 we used to do 5 hours on weekdays and up to 18 on weekends. I don't know how we went through so much material)
Hmmm on that note, suppose, say, Catholicism is "right" in this universe. When a human dies and made into a vampire, is their immortal soul judged and sent to heaven or hell? Or does the soul stay in the vampire until it does? Or does the act of making a vampire completely torch the soul altogether, and you have traded heaven/hell for a paltry thousand years or so? I suppose that depends on so many things that you can barely begin to speculate.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
OK. I am putting in that any sort of barrier to direct eye contact negates the orders, including ordinary corrective lenses or those stylish clear glasses that hipsters wear these days.
Good start. What about cigar smoke?
Air?
Yep. At the time it was written, it was silver not gold, and one of the gifts that the vampire gave to the robot to welcome her to the town was an aluminium necklace studded with jewels
You get metals that look like gold but aren't. (You also get gold that doesn't look like it - apparently you can get purple or blue variants among others). Apparently iron pyrite can look very golden.
What really happened was the android's lawyer - a werewolf - noticed that the town's big cheese vampire was assuming she was a more powerful vampire and naturally decided that it would be great leverage for her client.
...werewolves are specifically vulnerable to silver, though, right? So if the android is often dealing with the werewolf, then it makes sense not to have any real silver around, either.
I'm trying to work out, canonically, how good she is at her actual job.
Hmmmmmm. Well, she's doing most of this vampire-hunting after hours, right? And she's doing a lot of on-the-job poking into files and things, but I'm guessing that she probably also needs to spend some time out of the office during office hours for plotting reasons...
Hmmmm. Having her be the secretary and have to deal with all the admin is a great way for her to both pick up leads and have access to a lot of paperwork, but will tie her down in the office a lot.
It sounds like she's going to be doing a lot of skirting of the rules anyway, which means that there's two ways the Captain can deal with her. Of course he knows she's skirting the rules a lot - but as long as she's genuinely good at her job and manages well under pressure, he might decide that he doesn't Know unless someone brings it to his attention. If she's not, she's going to end up fired.
I'm imagining her as the person who gets sent in to the really dangerous situations - where there are hostages or the strong possibility of bullets flying or so on - because she handles that sort of tension really well, and knows exactly when to break the rules to save a hostage's life.
Ha, cool. Where abouts? (If you didn't work backwards from my antipode, I'm in Western Australia)
South. Way south. South Africa, in fact, so you don't get a more southerly country that's still in Africa.
Survivor has also filmed in Gabon (S19), which looked much nicer (all foresty) than the desolate savannah-type place in Kenya they filmed S2.
We've got foresty bits and desolate bits in here.
And Equestria. (Yes, seriously. I've been there. It's nothing like the show, it's just a suburb that coincidentally has that name)
Is it? I should ask. My boyfriend is about to do his phD/Masters (combined programme) in psychology, he would probably know this stuff.
Yeah, he'll know better than I do. I'm just assuming that the first time you do anything is when you're most likely to mess up.
Hmmm on that note, suppose, say, Catholicism is "right" in this universe. When a human dies and made into a vampire, is their immortal soul judged and sent to heaven or hell? Or does the soul stay in the vampire until it does? Or does the act of making a vampire completely torch the soul altogether, and you have traded heaven/hell for a paltry thousand years or so? I suppose that depends on so many things that you can barely begin to speculate.
Ooooooh. Hmmm. Vampire mythology suggests that a vampire trades their soul for their eternal life, and they've traded eternity for a few thousand years. But you don't heed to stick with that. William could be right - he could be just the left-behind body while his soul has moved on. Or perhaps he still has his soul, and his continual feeding off people and addicting them to his spit is doing bad things to it.
This is very much a case for authorial fiat. Does it make a difference to the story?
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
OK. I am putting in that any sort of barrier to direct eye contact negates the orders, including ordinary corrective lenses or those stylish clear glasses that hipsters wear these days.
Good start. What about cigar smoke? Air?
... well, that's an interesting thought. You'd think the designers of this feature would allow it to work in a smoky environment (e.g. near a fire set by an army sacking a village), but if that's the case why it would be stopped by ordinary eyeglasses (which though a reasonably recent invention, you'd assume the atlanteans had them also) rather than, say, working on sound alone is obviously an issue.
I guess you could say there's a physical barrier, that the magic of the vampire eye contact is like alpha particles, it's not going to be stopped by smoke but a piece of tissue paper will do it. (Just looked up alpha particles - smoke detectors work because the rate of alpha particles is reduced by smoke blocking their path - oh, and they get blocked by a few cm of air though that's mostly because of the magnetic charge).
Still, the same sort of "idea". Air and smoke are not as dense as glass. So it's just about having a certain density of material in between your eyes and the vampire's. Being behind a thin sheet of tissue paper might not protect you, but an ordinary piece of glass would.
Does that make sense? Seems like the most logical way to have the same sorts of limitations/etc.
Vampire mind control doesn't actually use particle radiation, just conceptually it's somewhere between alpha and beta particles (which need a few mm of aluminium) in terms of penetration ability.
Yep. At the time it was written, it was silver not gold, and one of the gifts that the vampire gave to the robot to welcome her to the town was an aluminium necklace studded with jewels
You get metals that look like gold but aren't. (You also get gold that doesn't look like it - apparently you can get purple or blue variants among others). Apparently iron pyrite can look very golden.
I will have to look into that, see what's around. That said, at that point, Our Heroes might be under the impression it's silver that's the big boogey man, so it's like a double fake-out.
...werewolves are specifically vulnerable to silver, though, right? So if the android is often dealing with the werewolf, then it makes sense not to have any real silver around, either.
Nah, werewolves aren't vulnerable to anything in particular (I mean, bullets will hurt them just as much as you'd expect!). They are big on family, nurturing, pack life, all that sort of thing, take in a lot of tortured souls. Essentially they are people who are sometimes wolves, but they can't control the transformation though it's pretty predictable (not related to the moon though).
I'm trying to work out, canonically, how good she is at her actual job.
Hmmmmmm. Well, she's doing most of this vampire-hunting after hours, right? And she's doing a lot of on-the-job poking into files and things, but I'm guessing that she probably also needs to spend some time out of the office during office hours for plotting reasons...
Yeah, all vampire hunting would be after hours, and she wouldn't have time for any hobbies whatsoever, so she could conceivably do both. She can also be "very dedicated to her job" and "stay back after hours" to "finish paperwork", AKA do half-assed paperwork and work on leads. Hell, maybe at one point she found some sort of (invisible?) demon who was happy to do her paperwork for her while she does "more important research things", like that fairy tale about the cobblers and the elves.
Hmmmm. Having her be the secretary and have to deal with all the admin is a great way for her to both pick up leads and have access to a lot of paperwork, but will tie her down in the office a lot.
Yeah, also, she's a pretty standard Action Girl archetype, has some decent MMA training, really good with a crossbow, etc, so I think it really would be a disservice to her character to have her "just" be a secretary.
It sounds like she's going to be doing a lot of skirting of the rules anyway, which means that there's two ways the Captain can deal with her. Of course he knows she's skirting the rules a lot - but as long as she's genuinely good at her job and manages well under pressure, he might decide that he doesn't Know unless someone brings it to his attention. If she's not, she's going to end up fired.
Yep. A kind of mutual understanding; and the Captain benefits because the slayer is doing all the little things perfectly, lest she draw attention to herself. Her performance reviews probably state she's a model employee but a bit impulsive and would still benefit from close supervision.
I'm imagining her as the person who gets sent in to the really dangerous situations - where there are hostages or the strong possibility of bullets flying or so on - because she handles that sort of tension really well, and knows exactly when to break the rules to save a hostage's life.
That's a good idea. I will need to write some drabble for that sort of situation.
South. Way south. South Africa, in fact, so you don't get a more southerly country that's still in Africa.
Cool! We have a lot of South African immigrants here for some reason. I used to work for one actually. That said, Stargate's Baal (Cliff Simon) was my teenage crush and his accent was just awesome.
Survivor has also filmed in Gabon (S19), which looked much nicer (all foresty) than the desolate savannah-type place in Kenya they filmed S2.
We've got foresty bits and desolate bits in here.
As does probably everywhere I guess!
And Equestria. (Yes, seriously. I've been there. It's nothing like the show, it's just a suburb that coincidentally has that name)
... Is it full of tourists (or was it) taking photos at the signs? Is it like a mini Fucking, Austria?
Is it? I should ask. My boyfriend is about to do his phD/Masters (combined programme) in psychology, he would probably know this stuff.
Yeah, he'll know better than I do. I'm just assuming that the first time you do anything is when you're most likely to mess up.
I asked him, he said that in undergrad you're often given descriptions of imaginary patients and asked what techniques you'd apply and how, what things you'd do differently based on their history, etc. They also do tons of clinical stuff if they want to go the clinical route. So it's probably similar to MDs - they are drilled on the material, they watch other people do it, they do it whilst other people watch, and then finally they're let off into the world with the mentors they've found along the way. So you're probably not going to screw a patient up, though you're definitely told to tell your patients to find someone else if you're not able to help them (apparently there's often personality conflicts. I had one really bad false start with a psychologist who just was not right for me, and so when I tried my third one I went for basically the best one that was recommended, and I said to her "I really don't like mindfulness" and she chuckled and was like, "I would not recommend mindfulness for someone like you, it would not suit your needs at all", which was the biggest relief ever...)
Ooooooh. Hmmm. Vampire mythology suggests that a vampire trades their soul for their eternal life, and they've traded eternity for a few thousand years
This is very much a case for authorial fiat. Does it make a difference to the story?
It doesn't make a difference to the story; for some reason I decided William had a catholic worldview (my former faith so I'm not entirely clueless), it seemed to make an odd sort of sense (canonically, he's Clovis I, first king of what is now France, and he converted to Catholicism at his wife's behest). Not sure why he keeps those thoughts or beliefs after 1500 years, but it provides him with some different motivations and whatnot. He obviously has a way of justifying his clearly un-catholic behaviour (murder, pre-marital relations, not going to mass, not going to confession(? maybe he does every few dozen years) etc), and maybe that's because he believes he lived an honourable life until his death, and that's what matters, since his immortal soul is probably in heaven, or will never be able to be, he can just enjoy what he has since either way he's dead forever. Or maybe vampires have catholicism 2.0 now, or maybe catholicism from circa 400 CE is very different to modern catholicism.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
Still, the same sort of "idea". Air and smoke are not as dense as glass. So it's just about having a certain density of material in between your eyes and the vampire's. Being behind a thin sheet of tissue paper might not protect you, but an ordinary piece of glass would.
Okay, so a solid object or a serious amount of gas. A pair of glasses will prevent it; the air in a normal room won't, but if I'm standing on the top of a mountain and the vampire is standing down in the valley, then even if he can look directly into my eyes at that distance there's probably enough air between us to counter the effect.
That seems reasonable.
Of course, there's probably going to be a vampire hunter who thinks, incorrectly, that mirrored sunglasses are necessary, and considers it more evidence in favour of this hypothesis every time that the mirrored sunglasses work...
...actually, talking of mirrors, if the vampire and the victim are both looking at a mirror and the vampire's eyes meet those of the victim's reflection, does that work?
(Related to that, in mythology vampires don't have a reflection. Do your vampires have reflections? I don't think we've discussed that...)
I will have to look into that, see what's around.
I think some of the types of fake gold are merely alloys that include a little gold, but not as much as has been advertised. Or are gold-plated instead of being pure gold. And both of those are probably still effective against vampires.
...a bit of googling suggests that gold-plating is common when dealing with fake gold (presumably because then you're sure you have the colour right).
But copper is more plentiful and cheaper yet has very similar metallurgical properties to gold (same column in the periodic table). I'd be very surprised if there wasn't some alloy of copper that looked gold at first glance. (It would probably get the weight wrong, there's not many metals as heavy as gold)
That said, at that point, Our Heroes might be under the impression it's silver that's the big boogey man, so it's like a double fake-out.
...fair point.
Nah, werewolves aren't vulnerable to anything in particular (I mean, bullets will hurt them just as much as you'd expect!).
Okay, that different to the mythological werewolves. (Who would be hurt by silver, but were invulnerable to anything else).
(Actually that could be due to some ancient werewolves trying to spread the rumour that they were invulnerable - together with arranging suitable demonstrations that seemed to prove it - until one brave villager really did genuinely attack with a silver knife and drove the pack away, leading to the legend that werewolves were invulnerable to anything except silver, an impression that the wolves themselves are in no hurry to correct)
Yeah, all vampire hunting would be after hours, and she wouldn't have time for any hobbies whatsoever, so she could conceivably do both. She can also be "very dedicated to her job" and "stay back after hours" to "finish paperwork", AKA do half-assed paperwork and work on leads. Hell, maybe at one point she found some sort of (invisible?) demon who was happy to do her paperwork for her while she does "more important research things", like that fairy tale about the cobblers and the elves.
That could work, but does the invisible demon have the necessary clearance to work on the secret stuff?
Yeah, also, she's a pretty standard Action Girl archetype, has some decent MMA training, really good with a crossbow, etc, so I think it really would be a disservice to her character to have her "just" be a secretary.
Secretaries have actually got incredible power. Especially when it comes to keeping the minutes of meetings (and especially when the people doing the meeting are a little elderly and their memories are no longer all that reliable).
Plus it gives her an excuse to look at pretty much any bit of paper she wants to.
(It's also possible that the secretarial duties are the one thing that nobody wants to do, and she keeps getting assigned them on the basis of her flagrant violation of uniform code with regard to coloured contact lenses which no-one notices except when it's time to decide who gets to fill in the paperwork)
Yep. A kind of mutual understanding; and the Captain benefits because the slayer is doing all the little things perfectly, lest she draw attention to herself. Her performance reviews probably state she's a model employee but a bit impulsive and would still benefit from close supervision.
Yep, that works.
Cool! We have a lot of South African immigrants here for some reason.
Politics. When the ANC came to power, a lot of people thought the country would go the same way as most African countries coming out of colonial rule, i.e. massive internal collapse because the guys in charge have little to no idea how to run a country and are enthusiastically getting rid of everyone who does know how to run a country.
There were a lot of people who left around then.
And, yes, there have been a few hiccups and problems since then, but significantly less than anyone would have expected; Mandela played a big part in making sure the country didn't fall right off the rails but only wobbled a little. (Unfortunately, Mandela's successors have been nowhere near his level, but fortunately the vulnerable period had already passed by then).
I used to work for one actually. That said, Stargate's Baal (Cliff Simon) was my teenage crush and his accent was just awesome.
...I've seen the film, but I don't really remember his accent.
Have you seen District Nine?
As does probably everywhere I guess!
If you really want me to give you some stats that other countries can't match... we've got an entire floral kingdom enclosed within our borders. And it's the only floral kingdom that actually relies on regular fires to propagate.
And Equestria. (Yes, seriously. I've been there. It's nothing like the show, it's just a suburb that coincidentally has that name)
... Is it full of tourists (or was it) taking photos at the signs? Is it like a mini Fucking, Austria?
Didn't see any. I don't think the brony fandom is that ubiquitous.
I asked him, he said that in undergrad you're often given descriptions of imaginary patients and asked what techniques you'd apply and how, what things you'd do differently based on their history, etc. They also do tons of clinical stuff if they want to go the clinical route. So it's probably similar to MDs - they are drilled on the material, they watch other people do it, they do it whilst other people watch, and then finally they're let off into the world with the mentors they've found along the way.
Okay, that seems a perfectly believable level of caution, now that I see it laid out.
One might assume that a mind-mage in training would receive a similar level of care in his education. Even if there's only one other mind-mage in the world who can train him, and half his time will be spent finding and training a successor...
maybe catholicism from circa 400 CE is very different to modern catholicism.
Different? Oh, yes, very different. That would have been before the Protestant Revolution, before the Spanish Inquisition, before... oh, before a lot of history.
...actually, perhaps he got involved in the purchase of indulgences, and thus believes himself immune to all sin, past, present and future? (There were certainly people who thought that indulgences could do that in fact, that's one of the things Luther was complaining about).
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
A pair of glasses will prevent it; the air in a normal room won't, but if I'm standing on the top of a mountain and the vampire is standing down in the valley, then even if he can look directly into my eyes at that distance there's probably enough air between us to counter the effect.
Exactly. Doesn't seem too easy to break, and insomuch as it can be it just makes it harder for vampires to do mind control - I should do the sums for the thickness of atoms in the plastic of a contact lens and find out the equivalent volume of air to produce the same thickness of atoms. I'm hoping for an effective "naked range" of 2-20m.
...actually, talking of mirrors, if the vampire and the victim are both looking at a mirror and the vampire's eyes meet those of the victim's reflection, does that work?
Hmm. I'm not sure. I'd like to say not because Perseus, but mirrored sunlight still kills a vampire so it probably should. Doesn't matter to me/the story either way so let's say it does. Sorry Perseus!
Do your vampires have reflections?
Yes, no real compelling reason they shouldn't, and if we found one it would probably have so many knock on effects that... yeah.
...gold-plating is common when dealing with fake gold
Yeah, gold-plating would be almost as good at killing vampires as solid gold, and better in some ways (lighter so more effective as a weapon/etc).
I'd be very surprised if there wasn't some alloy of copper that looked gold at first glance.
I don't know, if they tend to plate fake gold then either the copper alloy that looks golden is more expensive than gold itself (e.g. copper-platinum) or just doesn't look right.
Okay, that different to the mythological werewolves. (Who would be hurt by silver, but were invulnerable to anything else).
Basically, our werewolves literally are people who transform into wolves involuntarily under specific circumstances. They're surprisingly mundane, though they have their own little society.
(Actually that could be due to some ancient werewolves trying to spread the rumour that they were invulnerable)
Maybe, though as they can't turn into wolves at will or even predict the exact moment, it might make the demonstration a bit trickier to do.
That could work, but does the invisible demon have the necessary clearance to work on the secret stuff?
The invisible demon is kind of a stupid idea and I don't think I would want to go with it. She's probably "just" a real go-getter.
Secretaries have actually got incredible power. Plus it gives her an excuse to look at pretty much any bit of paper she wants to.
I didn't mean to say they didn't, I more meant the "origin story" we've more-or-less settled on (we're basically doing the origin story last, of course...) is that she sees a vampire during the course of her beat (or whatever) and shenanigans result, probably including a vombie which they won't understand and will just give them the impression that vampires are crazed beasts, so the discovery that William is a thinking, feeling being will be a nice twist.
The secretary angle reminds me that I had conceived as the vampire-hunting-mage as potentially the secretary at the police station, but I think we might put her somewhere else as her character's finally beginning to get more developed.
(It's also possible that the secretarial duties are the one thing that nobody wants to do, and she keeps getting assigned them on the basis of her flagrant violation of uniform code with regard to coloured contact lenses which no-one notices except when it's time to decide who gets to fill in the paperwork)
Honestly just being a woman rookie in a man's world is enough to get you to do the secretarial type roles, so I can easily see her having to take on some light duties like what you're describing here.
{colonialism and politics}
Postcolonial stuff is so complex. Has there ever been a country that was "colonised" that didn't completely fuck over their native populations? Like, I imagine if we discovered Australia today, we'd form a treaty with the aboriginals, maybe arrange some mining rights and whatnot, and settlement but "do everything right". New Zealand kind of sort of came close by signing a treaty with the native peoples, but it still ended up in a lot of war and attrition, though they seem to be coming out the other end better than Australia (and I'd imagine South Africa) is.
...I've seen the [Stargate] film, but I don't really remember [Cliff Simon's] accent.
Cliff Simon plays a major antagonist in seasons 6-10 of Stargate: SG-1, the TV series. Very fun 90s sci-fi show, I really enjoyed it but I'm not sure if I'd enjoy it watching it for the first time today because we're kind of in a "golden age" of TV quality.
Have you seen District Nine?
I haven't though it's on my HUGE to-watch list.
If you really want me to give you some stats that other countries can't match... we've got an entire floral kingdom enclosed within our borders. And it's the only floral kingdom that actually relies on regular fires to propagate.
I was going to say that the oldest-fossils-on-record are in Western Australia, but it turns out that they discovered fossils in Greenland that were even older two months ago. :(
One might assume that a mind-mage in training would receive a similar level of care in his education. Even if there's only one other mind-mage in the world who can train him, and half his time will be spent finding and training a successor...
You'd end up with some pretty crazy dynasties that way; because of the genetic component it'd be a lot of father training his son stuff. Probably a lot of incest too, to keep the bloodline "pure". Now I want to make Icelanders have a lot of concentrated magic, which explains all their crazy mythos about elves and stuff (my partner is Icelandic so it'd be a good nod to her heritage too).
maybe catholicism from circa 400 CE is very different to modern catholicism.
Different? Oh, yes, very different. That would have been before the Protestant Revolution, before the Spanish Inquisition, before... oh, before a lot of history.
Yeah. Researching the, well, basically pre-dark-ages history of Catholicism and the state of doctrine back then is kind of... not as exciting as other things I could be doing with my time, but would probably be a good way to broaden the character. I'm sure he needs work!
That said, I do think he'd enjoy the whole "divine right of kings" concept, and though it has roots in ancient egyptian mythology, its appearance in the Western world was actually comparatively recent when I looked it up - 1600s or something. But maybe the French Revolution upset him so much he decided this whole divine right of kings was a good idea.
...actually, perhaps he got involved in the purchase of indulgences, and thus believes himself immune to all sin, past, present and future?
That sounds like exactly the sort of self-serving, egomanical type of thing the man would do. He's probably feeling pretty secure about that immortal soul of his.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
Exactly. Doesn't seem too easy to break, and insomuch as it can be it just makes it harder for vampires to do mind control - I should do the sums for the thickness of atoms in the plastic of a contact lens and find out the equivalent volume of air to produce the same thickness of atoms. I'm hoping for an effective "naked range" of 2-20m.
...I tried looking up "molar mass of plastic". I found out the molar mass of PLaSTiC, which wasn't exactly what I was going for...
Still, you can pretty much set that air distance where you want to. It's quite possible that contact lenses could be a third of the thickness and still work, or that hydrocarbons are a significantly better blocker than air. This is basically going to be a matter of what works best for the plot.
Next question. When controlling someone, does a vampire need to actually give a verbal command?
Let's say there is a vampire at a live concert (indoors, so there's no sunlight to worry about). He's in the front row, close enough to the stage, and he wants to, say, make the singer drop his microphone. Can he do so non-verbally, and thus without the people around him taking any notice, or does he actually have to say something like "Drop it!" (And if he does, is the signer able to misunderstand him and drop something else instead? ...let's just say he's holding something in his other hand as well).
Hmm. I'm not sure. I'd like to say not because Perseus, but mirrored sunlight still kills a vampire so it probably should. Doesn't matter to me/the story either way so let's say it does. Sorry Perseus!
...not quite sure how that hurts Perseus, but okay, that makes sense.
Do your vampires have reflections?
Yes, no real compelling reason they shouldn't, and if we found one it would probably have so many knock on effects that... yeah.
Eeeeeexcellent. Next up; can a vampire, with the aid of a mirror, mind-control himself?
(I'm imagining this could potentially be very embarrassing, with the vampire frozen in front of the mirror, starring at his own eyes, until someone else comes and takes the mirror away)
I don't know, if they tend to plate fake gold then either the copper alloy that looks golden is more expensive than gold itself (e.g. copper-platinum) or just doesn't look right.
I've been looking into this a bit more, and apparently there's some types of brass that look really golden. One, called Prince's Metal (or Prince Rupert's Metal), being 75% copper and 25% zinc, was apparently used to imitate gold in the past. (You won't fool a metallurgist with it, because the weight is all wrong, but it's the right colour which is what's really important).
Basically, our werewolves literally are people who transform into wolves involuntarily under specific circumstances. They're surprisingly mundane, though they have their own little society.
Okie dokie.
Maybe, though as they can't turn into wolves at will or even predict the exact moment, it might make the demonstration a bit trickier to do.
Eh, if the villagers have caught Tom changing before, then it's just a matter of Tom setting things up to look immune. And maybe being lucky enough to change mid-demonstration.
The invisible demon is kind of a stupid idea and I don't think I would want to go with it. She's probably "just" a real go-getter.
Okie dokie.
I didn't mean to say they didn't, I more meant the "origin story" we've more-or-less settled on (we're basically doing the origin story last, of course...) is that she sees a vampire during the course of her beat (or whatever) and shenanigans result, probably including a vombie which they won't understand and will just give them the impression that vampires are crazed beasts, so the discovery that William is a thinking, feeling being will be a nice twist.
Ooooh, nice.
The secretary angle reminds me that I had conceived as the vampire-hunting-mage as potentially the secretary at the police station, but I think we might put her somewhere else as her character's finally beginning to get more developed.
She could be a childhood friend of said secretary, I'm sure that'll come in useful.
Like, I imagine if we discovered Australia today, we'd form a treaty with the aboriginals, maybe arrange some mining rights and whatnot, and settlement but "do everything right".
I hope you would, but I doubt you would. It's hard to take people seriously when they can't send a negotiator who's got a university-level qualification, and it's easy to take advantage of people who don't know the value of what they're selling (especially if they're selling stuff they didn't even know existed before they got to the negotiating table).
I'm not saying that war is inevitable or that you wouldn't do better now, but I'm sure there would still be problems and people taking advantage where they shouldn't.
New Zealand kind of sort of came close by signing a treaty with the native peoples, but it still ended up in a lot of war and attrition, though they seem to be coming out the other end better than Australia (and I'd imagine South Africa) is.
...I have absolutely no idea how well New Zealand is doing. I do know that we're doing very well, considering; and if we can just deal with certain corrupt politicians, we'll be doing even better.
I was going to say that the oldest-fossils-on-record are in Western Australia, but it turns out that they discovered fossils in Greenland that were even older two months ago. :(
We've got the Cradle of Humankind. Not the oldest human fossils ever found - apparently those were in Ethiopia - but some pretty old humanoid fossils.
You'd end up with some pretty crazy dynasties that way; because of the genetic component it'd be a lot of father training his son stuff. Probably a lot of incest too, to keep the bloodline "pure". Now I want to make Icelanders have a lot of concentrated magic, which explains all their crazy mythos about elves and stuff (my partner is Icelandic so it'd be a good nod to her heritage too).
Hmmmm... that's true. And then the father pushing the son to find a girl, get married, and then create and train the next generation. And the son, who knows very well how to manipulate a girl's emotions in a variety of undetectable ways, has to not do that and try to find a girlfriend the old-fashioned way... in the rare time between his lessons in mental manipulation.
And, at least in some generations in the past, the mind-mage isn't all that concerned about the girl's emotional independence, and he just finds one who looks good and makes her develop an attraction to him...
It's possible that that stopped when one of the wives found out and asserted her independence with a sword.
That said, I do think he'd enjoy the whole "divine right of kings" concept, and though it has roots in ancient egyptian mythology, its appearance in the Western world was actually comparatively recent when I looked it up - 1600s or something. But maybe the French Revolution upset him so much he decided this whole divine right of kings was a good idea.
In the old testament, the Israelite kings were specifically and deliberately chosen by God. If William has an ego (it sounds like he does), he can easily infer from that that he was a divinely-chosen monarch even if he didn't realise it at the time.
That sounds like exactly the sort of self-serving, egomanical type of thing the man would do. He's probably feeling pretty secure about that immortal soul of his.
But he may be a bit more worried about the immortal soul of his American soldier. Red didn't buy the indulgences, after all.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
Next question. When controlling someone, does a vampire need to actually give a verbal command?
Good one. I'm two minds about this: it makes sense conceptually that, for example, giving a command in sign language (whether like ASL or that military gesturing thing you see on TV), putting your fingers to your lips to indicate be quiet, etc would all be sensible ways this power could work.
However, also conceptually, you'd imagine the power would work from the vampire's gaze having a power over you. So if you stopped looking into her eyes to see what she was signing you to do, the spell would be broken.
I'd say that it can be a non-verbal command, however it has to be easily "read" by someone staring into your eyes. So you couldn't hold up a piece of paper with instructions on it, and you might not be able to sign (I'm not sure if you can understand sign language whilst staring into the speaker's eyes?), but you'd definitely be able to put your finger to your lips to indicate "quiet" for example.
Does he actually have to say something like "Drop it!" (And if he does, is the signer able to misunderstand him and drop something else instead? ...let's just say he's holding something in his other hand as well).
Using the gun to your head analogy: it would be the thing you thought they most probably meant. So, for example, if you had a microphone in one hand and a sandwich in the other and you were signing, you'd probably drop the microphone unless you saw the vampire was the person you stole the sandwich from.
You might be able to deliberately disobey (e.g. dropping your handbag rather than the gun you're pointing at the vampire's ally), but it would take a lot of guts, and the willpower to do so would be just below what it would take to just ignore the order in the first place.
...not quite sure how that hurts Perseus, but okay, that makes sense.
In the myth, he kills Medusa by using her reflection in his shield to guide his blade. If you look at Medusa, you turn to stone, but the reflection doesn't have the same property. So, using the mirror physics just proposed, Perseus would not be able to kill Medusa like that.
can a vampire, with the aid of a mirror, mind-control himself?
(I'm imagining this could potentially be very embarrassing, with the vampire frozen in front of the mirror, starring at his own eyes, until someone else comes and takes the mirror away)
Vampires are immune to mind control, so no. It also takes effort to do, so it'd be hard to come up with a situation where a vampire might try and control her reflection (though you could always throw a mirror in the way before they try and control you. But as I said, it's moot, as vampires are immune).
I've been looking into this a bit more, and apparently there's some types of brass that look really golden.
Oh yeah. Might work well instead of aluminium. I was proud of the aluminium fakeout though, because aluminium used to be so valuable so it would make sense as a gift given by a long-lived being, and now would be seen as a unbelievably cheap fake silver.
shenanigans result, probably including a vombie which they won't understand and will just give them the impression that vampires are crazed beasts, so the discovery that William is a thinking, feeling being will be a nice twist.
Ooooh, nice.
Yeah. I'm tossing up all my ideas for JaNoWriMo now I've decided that I'll do it. I can see a kind of rational prologue, with the hunters trying all sorts of things (mirrors, etc) could be fun. But I've been watching Jane the Virgin and it's made me feel a lot better about romance as a genre. We'll see what gets me excited when I come around to choosing between ideas.
Like, I imagine if we discovered Australia today, we'd form a treaty with the aboriginals, maybe arrange some mining rights and whatnot, and settlement but "do everything right".
I hope you would, but I doubt you would. It's hard to take people seriously when they can't send a negotiator who's got a university-level qualification, and it's easy to take advantage of people who don't know the value of what they're selling (especially if they're selling stuff they didn't even know existed before they got to the negotiating table).
I'm not saying that war is inevitable or that you wouldn't do better now, but I'm sure there would still be problems and people taking advantage where they shouldn't.
Maybe. But we have the Sentinelese people and those uncontacted tribes out in the middle of Brazil, and they're left mostly alone. (Well, the Sentinelese people don't give us much say in the matter what with all the arrows). Then again, they also live in areas that are pretty undesireable, whereas Australia, the Americas, Africa all have gold, diamonds, vast tracts of land, etc.
I like to have faith in people but you may be right.
...I have absolutely no idea how well New Zealand is doing. I do know that we're doing very well, considering; and if we can just deal with certain corrupt politicians, we'll be doing even better.
The considering is the bad part though. I don't know what the situation is like in NZ or South Africa, but Australia has a 10 year difference in life expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Lower graduation rates, higher suicide rates, higher incarceration rates, higher rates of infant mortality, the list goes on. A lot of that is related to alcohol, smoking, and the fact that indigenous people tend to live in rural areas more often. A gap of 10 years is just appalling though.
New Zealand has put more recognition for Maori language programmes, has a lot of good social policies, etc.
We've got the Cradle of Humankind. Not the oldest human fossils ever found - apparently those were in Ethiopia - but some pretty old humanoid fossils.
Yeah well - well - check out this rock!
Hmmmm... that's true. And then the father pushing the son to find a girl, get married, and then create and train the next generation. And the son, who knows very well how to manipulate a girl's emotions in a variety of undetectable ways, has to not do that and try to find a girlfriend the old-fashioned way... in the rare time between his lessons in mental manipulation.
Oh god.... can you imagine what that relationship would look like? A relationship between equals after someone had gone through life being told nobody was? It would take some intense parental meddling.
And, at least in some generations in the past, the mind-mage isn't all that concerned about the girl's emotional independence, and he just finds one who looks good and makes her develop an attraction to him...
It's possible that that stopped when one of the wives found out and asserted her independence with a sword.
Yeah, assuming mages wouldn't bother training their powerful daughters. I suppose if they had a suitable son why waste the effort. You might end up with some very post-apocalyptic type scenarios if you were able to subjugate the erstwhile mothers easily enough. :(
In the old testament, the Israelite kings were specifically and deliberately chosen by God. If William has an ego (it sounds like he does), he can easily infer from that that he was a divinely-chosen monarch even if he didn't realise it at the time.
"It all makes sense! The reason I'm so awesome and was able to get eternal meat-suit life is because God chose me for it. I'm going to go around collecting junk, watching plays, and maccing on dudes now. That is the life God would want for me"
Yeah.... I actually really can see it. He's just waiting for the veil of ignorance to lift and for France to recognise him as their rightful king so he can go back to ruling, only instead of basically being a war-chief he goes to a lot of meetings about agriculture and immigration and wonders where all the swordfights are.
That sounds like exactly the sort of self-serving, egomanical type of thing the man would do. He's probably feeling pretty secure about that immortal soul of his.
But he may be a bit more worried about the immortal soul of his American soldier. Red didn't buy the indulgences, after all.
Yeah, but, I gotta level with you - he loves Red and all, but his wife-whilst-human is waiting for him (or already with him? who knows!) up in heaven (surely! He bought her tons of posthumous indulgences!). Red can do what he likes, William's got a backup plan.
... maybe that's not the most romantic thing to have. But I think that's how his mind is gonna work.
Of course, it would be great if Red could get his immortal soul saved and all that - he asked him a few times whilst he was alive, and it seemed he was on some variation of what Saint Paul started only a few hundred years before William was born. No chance of him getting an authentic 5th century catholic priest to bless him and make sure it's all legit, unless - oh god, William is going to turn the world upside down to try and find an authentic 5th (or really, 6th or 7th will do) century vampire priest to get all this down.
... Maybe the Vatican has one?
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 months later)
I'd say that it can be a non-verbal command, however it has to be easily "read" by someone staring into your eyes.
Okay, so there's no direct mental link, but a vampire could still command someone by tapping on the back of their hand in morse code (assuming the victim knows morse code). Fair enough.
You might be able to deliberately disobey (e.g. dropping your handbag rather than the gun you're pointing at the vampire's ally), but it would take a lot of guts, and the willpower to do so would be just below what it would take to just ignore the order in the first place.
Okay, but can you deliberately misunderstand (if, say, it's a genuinely ambiguous request)? Let's say the victim is holding a sandwich and a handbag and the vampire says "Drop it", and he's not quite sure which one he means. (Or does he drop both, just to make sure he's dropping the right one?)
Of course, a smart vampire would simply give unambiguous commands, either way.
In the myth, he kills Medusa by using her reflection in his shield to guide his blade.
Ah, I see. (I seem to remember a variation where he tricked Medusa into seeing her own reflection in the shield, thus turning her to stone - that may have been a modern twist on the original myth, though.)
Vampires are immune to mind control, so no. It also takes effort to do, so it'd be hard to come up with a situation where a vampire might try and control her reflection (though you could always throw a mirror in the way before they try and control you. But as I said, it's moot, as vampires are immune).
Okay, that's simple and straightforward.
I was proud of the aluminium fakeout though, because aluminium used to be so valuable so it would make sense as a gift given by a long-lived being, and now would be seen as a unbelievably cheap fake silver.
Yeah, that does work out really well.
Yeah. I'm tossing up all my ideas for JaNoWriMo now I've decided that I'll do it. I can see a kind of rational prologue, with the hunters trying all sorts of things (mirrors, etc) could be fun. But I've been watching Jane the Virgin and it's made me feel a lot better about romance as a genre. We'll see what gets me excited when I come around to choosing between ideas.
Okie dokie lokie.
Maybe. But we have the Sentinelese people and those uncontacted tribes out in the middle of Brazil, and they're left mostly alone. (Well, the Sentinelese people don't give us much say in the matter what with all the arrows). Then again, they also live in areas that are pretty undesireable, whereas Australia, the Americas, Africa all have gold, diamonds, vast tracts of land, etc.
Yeah... I class that as mostly neutral. It's not like contacting them is going particularly well, it's simply that there is practically no contact. It's a lot better than some other tribes have got, and the isolationist policy isn't bad in and of itself (but it is very close to some very bad policies if someone else decides they want part of the land), but it's also not really a good policy, I think.
(Mind you, given what happened to most tribes that didn't chase away strangers, I don't think the Sentinelese have exactly the wrong idea).
The considering is the bad part though. I don't know what the situation is like in NZ or South Africa, but Australia has a 10 year difference in life expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Lower graduation rates, higher suicide rates, higher incarceration rates, higher rates of infant mortality, the list goes on. A lot of that is related to alcohol, smoking, and the fact that indigenous people tend to live in rural areas more often. A gap of 10 years is just appalling though.
Yeah... we have absolutely horrendous rural medical systems. (Cities, no problem. Doesn't matter what race you are, if you can reach a good hospital you're pretty good; if you live out in the back of beyond, you've got problems). But then there are some racial groups more likely to live out in the back of beyond and others more likely to live in urban areas, so...
Took me a bit of googling to find actual stats on that, but suffice to say that we're doing worse than Australia. (If we can get a better handle on infant mortality, we'll do a whole lot better on that front.)
We've got great language policies, though. (Seriously, we have eleven official languages, and you can interact with any government department in any of them. And the university I went to had a language policy of "if there's ten students who want to learn the subject in this language, and if we can find a lecturer who can teach the subject in this language, then we'll offer it in this language").
Yeah well - well - check out this rock!
That's a pretty impressive rock.
Yeah, assuming mages wouldn't bother training their powerful daughters. I suppose if they had a suitable son why waste the effort. You might end up with some very post-apocalyptic type scenarios if you were able to subjugate the erstwhile mothers easily enough. :(
It works the other way round, too, with the daughters subjugating their husbands. It's less of a gender-induced split and more of a mage-versus-muggle split, really.
"It all makes sense! The reason I'm so awesome and was able to get eternal meat-suit life is because God chose me for it. I'm going to go around collecting junk, watching plays, and maccing on dudes now. That is the life God would want for me"
Well, of course. He's already perfect, so everything he does is by definition perfect, right? He wouldn't be put in that situation if he wasn't immeasurably improving it by his mere existence.
Yeah.... I actually really can see it. He's just waiting for the veil of ignorance to lift and for France to recognise him as their rightful king so he can go back to ruling, only instead of basically being a war-chief he goes to a lot of meetings about agriculture and immigration and wonders where all the swordfights are.
...I can imagine him making the meetings a lot more memorable by introducing sword-fights.
Yeah, but, I gotta level with you - he loves Red and all, but his wife-whilst-human is waiting for him (or already with him? who knows!) up in heaven (surely! He bought her tons of posthumous indulgences!). Red can do what he likes, William's got a backup plan.
I can certainly see that working, yes.
William is going to turn the world upside down to try and find an authentic 5th (or really, 6th or 7th will do) century vampire priest to get all this down.
Ooooh, that's going to be tricky.
... Maybe the Vatican has one?
No.
That is to say, I'm not saying there are no vampire priests. But if there are any that still report to the Vatican, then they have to follow the Vatican's modern stance on indulgences, which means William is out of luck in his quest. (Worse yet, he'll probably be subjected to a lecture about why he didn't get what he thought he got with the original indulgences...) Even if they don't still report to the Vatican (e.g. they may have joined one of the Protestant churches) the odds are that they've abandoned the whole business of indulgences (this being a fair chunk of what the protestants were protesting against).
So, William's going to be having a really difficult time here.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
Okay, but can you deliberately misunderstand (if, say, it's a genuinely ambiguous request)? Let's say the victim is holding a sandwich and a handbag and the vampire says "Drop it", and he's not quite sure which one he means. (Or does he drop both, just to make sure he's dropping the right one?)
If someone had a gun to your head and told you to "drop it", would you try and figure out what they meant or would you drop them both? I'd probably drop them both, because I'd know that dropping the wrong one could be bad. That's what I'd rule. Again, with sufficient willpower/motivation you could probably deliberately misunderstand, but it would be say 80% of the willpower required to outright reject the command.
Ah, I see. (I seem to remember a variation where he tricked Medusa into seeing her own reflection in the shield, thus turning her to stone - that may have been a modern twist on the original myth, though.)
Maybe. In the myth he carries her head around in a bag and takes it out to turn a bunch of people into stone, so it probably wasn't stone. That said given her dead head had stone powers, maybe her stone head would have stone powers?
Yeah... I class that as mostly neutral. It's not like contacting them is going particularly well, it's simply that there is practically no contact. It's a lot better than some other tribes have got, and the isolationist policy isn't bad in and of itself (but it is very close to some very bad policies if someone else decides they want part of the land), but it's also not really a good policy, I think.
Yeah, because those isolated tribes are probably dying of infectious diseases, high infant mortality, etc. So they probably do have a huge life expectancy gap that would put the ones in our respective countries to shame.
Could.... could colonialism actually have improved the lives of the subjugated? I mean, bad times, separated from their families and all that, but they'd live longer. But they also would have their culture, language, and traditions which probably has some asimovian zeroth law importance....
Doesn't matter what race you are, if you can reach a good hospital you're pretty good; if you live out in the back of beyond, you've got problems
Yeah, the issue isn't so much that the doctors aren't treating people who need it, but that the system as a whole puts people in the wrong frame of mind (e.g. low food literacy => people won't cook and eat healthy food => diabetes)
We've got great language policies, though.
That's so cool! I kind of resent that I grew up in an anglophone country, because I feel like I have the sort of personality that would make me want to learn English to participate in the Wider Internet, so I'd be more motivated to learn a second language. As it is my French is B1/B2 level and I am working hard at it but.... there's no real concrete motivation.
It works the other way round, too, with the daughters subjugating their husbands. It's less of a gender-induced split and more of a mage-versus-muggle split, really.
Yeah, and I suppose if Atlantis was a post-gender utopia, the mages might well be too. I'm just applying typical tropes to it, which probably isn't the best idea.
Well, of course. He's already perfect, so everything he does is by definition perfect, right? He wouldn't be put in that situation if he wasn't immeasurably improving it by his mere existence.
His ego was big enough before you put that bug in my ear.... You're right, though. He just mostly keeps it to himself.
...I can imagine him making the meetings a lot more memorable by introducing sword-fights.
He'd never lose another election. Actual combat experience plus 1500 years of vampire powers? Then again, his vampire rivals might want France for themselves. Oh god, a future where the vampires out "out of the coffin" and decide to wrest back overt control of the world is.... awesome.
That is to say, I'm not saying there are no vampire priests. But if there are any that still report to the Vatican, then they have to follow the Vatican's modern stance on indulgences, which means William is out of luck in his quest. (Worse yet, he'll probably be subjected to a lecture about why he didn't get what he thought he got with the original indulgences...) Even if they don't still report to the Vatican (e.g. they may have joined one of the Protestant churches) the odds are that they've abandoned the whole business of indulgences (this being a fair chunk of what the protestants were protesting against).
I was more imagining the Vatican having a priest on retainer, in their famous ineffable catacombs, and that's why the Catholic church has a reputation for being so conservative (they did preach in Latin in living memory, after all). That priest is possibly a Pope from way back, and, well, the rest kind of writes itself.
Then again, this becomes Dan Brown 2.0, the Vatican is a conspiracy, etc so maybe best just to ignore it.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 months later)
If someone had a gun to your head and told you to "drop it", would you try and figure out what they meant or would you drop them both? I'd probably drop them both, because I'd know that dropping the wrong one could be bad. That's what I'd rule. Again, with sufficient willpower/motivation you could probably deliberately misunderstand, but it would be say 80% of the willpower required to outright reject the command.
Okay, fair enough.
New question. Vern the Vampire hands Tim a gun, tries to Control him to shoot himself. Does Tim do so?
Using the gun-to-the-head analogy, I'd think he wouldn't, regardless of his willpower - he comes off no worse for refusing that command than for following it.
Maybe. In the myth he carries her head around in a bag and takes it out to turn a bunch of people into stone, so it probably wasn't stone. That said given her dead head had stone powers, maybe her stone head would have stone powers?
I don't see why not.
The other option, of course, is that Medusa knew that looking at her own reflection would stone her, and took the simple precaution of shutting her eyes. And Perseus, of course, shut his eyes... which put them on an equal footing. Only Perseus was armed and knew how to use a sword, so Medusa had no chance...
Yeah, because those isolated tribes are probably dying of infectious diseases, high infant mortality, etc. So they probably do have a huge life expectancy gap that would put the ones in our respective countries to shame.
Exactly, yes.
Could.... could colonialism actually have improved the lives of the subjugated? I mean, bad times, separated from their families and all that, but they'd live longer. But they also would have their culture, language, and traditions which probably has some asimovian zeroth law importance....
Better medical care helps them. The trick is finding a way to get the better medical care to them without separating them from their families and stuff. It may well be that they're a good deal happier having full control over their lands than they would be living in a slum, I can believe that... but there must be some way of getting them the medical care (and electricity and stuff) without putting them in a slum.
And I can definitely believe that someone like Jacob Zuma (current South African president, and Zulu) is doing a lot better where he is now than if colonists had never visited South Africa.
So.... it's iffy. There's good and bad, and for the first generation there's a lot of bad and not all that much good... but several generations down the line, done properly, there could be a lot of good.
Yeah, the issue isn't so much that the doctors aren't treating people who need it, but that the system as a whole puts people in the wrong frame of mind (e.g. low food literacy => people won't cook and eat healthy food => diabetes)
Yeah, education is important. People need to know things, and the most important thing that people can learn is how to learn and think logically about things.
That's so cool! I kind of resent that I grew up in an anglophone country, because I feel like I have the sort of personality that would make me want to learn English to participate in the Wider Internet, so I'd be more motivated to learn a second language. As it is my French is B1/B2 level and I am working hard at it but.... there's no real concrete motivation.
Meeste mense hier is tweetalig (nie altyd dieselfde twee tale nie). My Afrikaans is nie te goed nie, maar ek kan dit praat.
Most people here are bilingual (not always the same two languages). My Afrikaans isn't all that great, but I can speak it.
(The only French I know is "Bonjour", though.)
I'm not quite sure what you mean by B1/B2 level...
He'd never lose another election. Actual combat experience plus 1500 years of vampire powers? Then again, his vampire rivals might want France for themselves. Oh god, a future where the vampires out "out of the coffin" and decide to wrest back overt control of the world is.... awesome.
How would sword-fighting win him elections? I mean, yes, he'd win the fights (until someone challenged him to meet them in the city square at noon) but I'm not seeing how that translates into guaranteed votes.
...this might actually be the explicit aim of some vampire politicians. Reveal themselves to the public eye, then rule the world. Of course, before they reveal themselves, they've just got to kill off this irritatingly persistent sect of vampire hunters...
I was more imagining the Vatican having a priest on retainer, in their famous ineffable catacombs, and that's why the Catholic church has a reputation for being so conservative (they did preach in Latin in living memory, after all). That priest is possibly a Pope from way back, and, well, the rest kind of writes itself.
I'm pretty sure that a Pope remains a Pope as long as he's still alive. 'Alive' is a bit iffy in the case of vampires, and then there's the whole 'unholy abomination' angle to worry about... but I doubt there would be a vampire Pope given that there are other Popes after that.
A vampire cardinal, on the other hand, is a lot more possible. But I don't see what he really changes insofar as the Vatican is concerned. All it means is that when all the cardinals meet, there's this one guy who'd been at every meeting for the last thousand years.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
New question. Vern the Vampire hands Tim a gun, tries to Control him to shoot himself. Does Tim do so?
Using the gun-to-the-head analogy, I'd think he wouldn't, regardless of his willpower - he comes off no worse for refusing that command than for following it.
Yeah, Tim would not shoot himself in those situations. You basically can't Control someone to do something that would kill them.
I had a thought though - I said Control doesn't work unless you've got eye contact. I can see that the Vampire would need to look into the victim's eyes (to.... aim the Control beam?), but they can still see the eyes regardless.
It looks like the pupil is literally a hole through to the retina, so I guess you could say that Control works through pupil-to-pupil line of sight, and it would make sense that way. But the cornea sits in front of the pupil so it's not like an actual hole.
And Perseus, of course, shut his eyes too... which put them on an equal footing. Only Perseus was armed and knew how to use a sword, so Medusa had no chance...
Medusa's hair is made of snakes. Snakes have eyes. Maybe Medusa can see via the snakes? Or if they have no neural connection and are just like symbionts, the snakes could probably bite Perseus - at least if Medusa maneuvered to allow this. Might be interesting.
Could.... could colonialism actually have improved the lives of the subjugated?
It may well be that they're a good deal happier having full control over their lands than they would be living in a slum, I can believe that... but there must be some way of getting them the medical care (and electricity and stuff) without putting them in a slum.
Yeah. I found out that apparently "aboriginals live longer and have better child mortality than they would 'in the wild'" is actually a way terrible people try and justify colonialism, so, that's kind of horrific on another level.
Australia has some goals for indigenous welfare, but they're not being met (and some things have even got worse since they were set as goals!). It's kind of infuriating. And then you meet people who are actually, legitimately, full-on racist and aren't shy about admitting it to you when you are talking about how terrible racists are. It's like... how???
So.... it's iffy. There's good and bad, and for the first generation there's a lot of bad and not all that much good... but several generations down the line, done properly, there could be a lot of good.
I think "done properly" you can have a first generation of lots of good and no bad. You know, fairytale version: we land in Botany Bay, we share our food with the aboriginies, show them how to use guns to hunt kangaroo, give them medicine for TB, and so on, society comes together from a meeting of equals and both cultures are maintained.
Most people here are bilingual (not always the same two languages). My Afrikaans isn't all that great, but I can speak it.
So jealous. I've heard TV shows have characters breaking in between 4 languages in the same conversation.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by B1/B2 level...
It's on the CEFR, which is probably the "best" way to describe "how well you speak" language X that I've seen (though I haven't looked especially hard).
How would sword-fighting win him elections?
What elections? He's the rightful king.
...this might actually be the explicit aim of some vampire politicians. Reveal themselves to the public eye, then rule the world. Of course, before they reveal themselves, they've just got to kill off this irritatingly persistent sect of vampire hunters...
Once vampires reveal themselves, vampire hunters are going to become ubiquitous anyway since it's a cultural touchstone. I don't know if it was ever covered in True Blood, though they definitely covered sects forming to eliminate the vampires, so... probably?
I'm pretty sure that a Pope remains a Pope as long as he's still alive.
Pope Benedict XVI would like a word with you, and there's a long and colourful history of papal resignations.
A vampire cardinal, on the other hand, is a lot more possible. But I don't see what he really changes insofar as the Vatican is concerned. All it means is that when all the cardinals meet, there's this one guy who'd been at every meeting for the last thousand years.
A cardinal does sound a lot more exciting, though, and you could see someone from circa 600 getting more and more annoyed as the church moves away from whatever it was meant to be. Soon they might stop teaching transubstantiation and then where would Catholicism be??
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
Yeah, Tim would not shoot himself in those situations. You basically can't Control someone to do something that would kill them.
Knowingly. Vern the Vampire can presumably Control Tim to drink the liquid in this glass, which is totally not a super-acidic poison, honest.
I had a thought though - I said Control doesn't work unless you've got eye contact. I can see that the Vampire would need to look into the victim's eyes (to.... aim the Control beam?), but they can still see the eyes regardless.
It looks like the pupil is literally a hole through to the retina, so I guess you could say that Control works through pupil-to-pupil line of sight, and it would make sense that way. But the cornea sits in front of the pupil so it's not like an actual hole.
And even then, it's only a hole to the retina. The retina doesn't (usually) control the brain.
Medusa's hair is made of snakes. Snakes have eyes. Maybe Medusa can see via the snakes? Or if they have no neural connection and are just like symbionts, the snakes could probably bite Perseus - at least if Medusa maneuvered to allow this. Might be interesting.
Perseus could have worn thick, perhaps armoured gloves. Could the snakes look at Medusa's reflection without turning to stone?
...either way, their hissing would kind of clue Perseus in as to the location of the head to which they were attached. (Snakes don't always hiss, but they certainly do when they're agitated, and I imagine that a guy wandering around with a sword trying to cut Medusa's head off would be rather agitating).
Yeah. I found out that apparently "aboriginals live longer and have better child mortality than they would 'in the wild'" is actually a way terrible people try and justify colonialism, so, that's kind of horrific on another level.
"Hey, look, this course of action led to this one good thing! Let's ignore all the bad things that came with it!"
Australia has some goals for indigenous welfare, but they're not being met (and some things have even got worse since they were set as goals!). It's kind of infuriating.
Have you tried electing a representative of the indigenous people as President? (It looks good on paper, but make very sure you choose the right one).
And then you meet people who are actually, legitimately, full-on racist and aren't shy about admitting it to you when you are talking about how terrible racists are. It's like... how???
You get some people here who try to claim with a straight face that only white people can be racists.
This gives me the same sort of reaction.
I think "done properly" you can have a first generation of lots of good and no bad. You know, fairytale version: we land in Botany Bay, we share our food with the aboriginies, show them how to use guns to hunt kangaroo, give them medicine for TB, and so on, society comes together from a meeting of equals and both cultures are maintained.
That's the ideal. I'm not sure how it'll work in reality.
I don't know how Australia worked, but I do know that when the colonists first landed in South Africa, they weren't exactly landing in a peaceful, enlightened civilisation where no-one is at war. Had they decided to simply give the Zulus guns, then the Zulus would almost certainly have turned them on the Xhosas - and vice versa, of course. (Oh, sure, they'd be used for hunting a bit as well, but what better time to kill those guys over there and take their cattle?)
So... still loads of Bad, just different Bad.
So jealous. I've heard TV shows have characters breaking in between 4 languages in the same conversation.
They put subtitles on those. (Also, try to watch District Nine).
It's on the CEFR, which is probably the "best" way to describe "how well you speak" language X that I've seen (though I haven't looked especially hard).
...then I think I can put my Afrikaans at about B2 level.
What elections? He's the rightful king.
...you said he'd never lose another election...
Once vampires reveal themselves, vampire hunters are going to become ubiquitous anyway since it's a cultural touchstone.
Maybe they just want to first kill off the guys who actually know what they are doing, and make sure that that knowledge is very properly and extremely thoroughly lost?
...they (think that they) can easily handle a bunch of wannabes with no idea what they're getting themselves into.
Pope Benedict XVI would like a word with you, and there's a long and colourful history of papal resignations.
Oh. Ooooops.
A cardinal does sound a lot more exciting, though, and you could see someone from circa 600 getting more and more annoyed as the church moves away from whatever it was meant to be. Soon they might stop teaching transubstantiation and then where would Catholicism be??
...he would not have liked the Second Vatican Council.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
Knowingly. Vern the Vampire can presumably Control Tim to drink the liquid in this glass, which is totally not a super-acidic poison, honest.
Absolutely. Or, you know, Vern can just run after him with his super speed. Tim doesn't have a chance!
It's like this scene in Stargate: SG-1:
BRA'TAC: The shield generators are far below. There, in the very bowels of the ship. We must climb down several decks, through the length of the ship. Then, taking our weapons, we must…
[O'Neill pulls the pins on two hand-grenades and drops them into the shield generators, blowing them up.]
O'NEILL: Grenades.
TEAL'C: This vessel is no longer protected by an energy field.
CARTER: So that's it?
TEAL'C: That is it.
Why overcomplicate things?
And even then, it's only a hole to the retina. The retina doesn't (usually) control the brain.
What are the control problem people saying? Unfriendly AI could hijack your brain using a text terminal? Who knows what Sufficiently Advanced Magic could do by manipulating the retina. After all, you can give some people seizures that way. I mean, you can transmit radio without radio hardware by using the system BUS, thus in theory making isolating an AGI from networks futile, then I think all bets are off.
Could the snakes look at Medusa's reflection without turning to stone?
Must be able to, after all, they see her actual face on a regular basis. (Slightly offtopic - or slightly more ontopic depending on how you look at it - we have a mentioned-in-passing character who is a medusa-like Gorgon, and she wears a full on burka and dark glasses to operate in society. I always wondered if it makes sense. I suppose with mirrored glasses you don't see any of her....)
"Hey, look, this course of action led to this one good thing! Let's ignore all the bad things that came with it!"
People think like that.
Have you tried electing a representative of the indigenous people as President? (It looks good on paper, but make very sure you choose the right one).
Indigenous representation in politics in general is pretty abysmal. I don't think there's any chance of an aboriginal being elected Prime Minister any time soon, I think there are two or three in our entire political system? Looking at the wikipedia page, we have 4, 5 if you count a non-indigenous person with indigenous ancestry.
Proportionally, we should have 6 in the Federal parliament. Apparently New Zealand has 7 maori seats, we have no such thing!
State parliaments look equally bad, except in the NT (6/25; indigenous people are 15% of the population there so they're actually over-represented if anything, but probably less so for their divisions as I'd imagine a lot of them are very rural).
I think "done properly" you can have a first generation of lots of good and no bad. You know, fairytale version: we land in Botany Bay, we share our food with the aboriginies, show them how to use guns to hunt kangaroo, give them medicine for TB, and so on, society comes together from a meeting of equals and both cultures are maintained.
That's the ideal. I'm not sure how it'll work in reality.
Probably won't. Let's hope the aliens are nice when they come.
I don't know how Australia worked, but I do know that when the colonists first landed in South Africa, they weren't exactly landing in a peaceful, enlightened civilisation where no-one is at war. Had they decided to simply give the Zulus guns, then the Zulus would almost certainly have turned them on the Xhosas - and vice versa, of course. (Oh, sure, they'd be used for hunting a bit as well, but what better time to kill those guys over there and take their cattle?)
So... still loads of Bad, just different Bad.
I'm not sure about what the inter-tribal relationships in pre-colonial Australia were like. Generally speaking, we're dealing with nomadic people living on the land whereas it sounds like the Zulus and Xhosas had a lot more infrastructure? Regardless, Australia had a huge number of diverse language groups, but I recall being taught in school they had no concept of property ownership. They're definitely not famous for being warlike like the maori, though I'm sure with that many language groups there's a lot of cultural variation.
What elections? He's the rightful king.
...you said he'd never lose another election...
Shhhhhh
Maybe they just want to first kill off the guys who actually know what they are doing, and make sure that that knowledge is very properly and extremely thoroughly lost?
That's true. Hard for knowledge to be lost in the days of the internet, though. They might have missed that boat. If nothing else, people today can strategise on a large scale.
A cardinal does sound a lot more exciting, though, and you could see someone from circa 600 getting more and more annoyed as the church moves away from whatever it was meant to be. Soon they might stop teaching transubstantiation and then where would Catholicism be??
...he would not have liked the Second Vatican Council.
...he probably turned a bunch of Cardinals as time went along, trying to get a group that did what he wanted. Many of them met the sun though and finally the humans had control. Haha. I don't think I want a vampire catholic church but.... you know, it's pretty fun to think about.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
Absolutely. Or, you know, Vern can just run after him with his super speed. Tim doesn't have a chance!
Yeah, but sometimes you want it to look like suicide, so...
It's like this scene in Stargate: SG-1:
Ah, a classic dungeon bypass scene.
(I take it the aliens didn't have throwable explosive weapons...)
What are the control problem people saying? Unfriendly AI could hijack your brain using a text terminal?
I think that's more a matter of simply being able to model you accurately enough to work out exactly what to say to persuade you to do what it wants. (There's nothing special about the retina here - it can do the same over an audio link).
I mean, you can transmit radio without radio hardware by using the system BUS, thus in theory making isolating an AGI from networks futile, then I think all bets are off.
Hmmmm. Transmit, yes, but (a) I see nothing about receiving, and (b) all that is means is that if you really want to isolate it, you need a faraday cage.
Anyhow, this is all irrelevant the point (which wasn't as clear as it should have been, for which I apologise). Yes, you can simply say that Sufficiently Advanced Magic allows control of someone by having Control Particles hit the retina - but you can equally well say that Sufficiently Advanced Magic allows control of something by having Control Particles hit the cornea.
Must be able to, after all, they see her actual face on a regular basis.
Hmmmm. Fair enough.
(Slightly offtopic - or slightly more ontopic depending on how you look at it - we have a mentioned-in-passing character who is a medusa-like Gorgon, and she wears a full on burka and dark glasses to operate in society. I always wondered if it makes sense. I suppose with mirrored glasses you don't see any of her....)
I am left wondering what her hair thinks about being trapped under fabric like that all the time. I'm imagining some seriously unhappy snakes.
Indigenous representation in politics in general is pretty abysmal.
Ah.
...lack of political representation is probably going to keep things pretty bad for them, unfortunately. I mean, lots of people will say the right things, but with little actual personal stake in the whole thing, plus they get most of the advantage in terms of votes by simply saying the right things without putting much effort into doing the right things... well, I don't expect them to put much effort into the actual doing.
Probably won't. Let's hope the aliens are nice when they come.
Yeah, especially given that they're going to be several million years more advanced than us. (Maybe they'll have solved this problem already).
I'm not sure about what the inter-tribal relationships in pre-colonial Australia were like. Generally speaking, we're dealing with nomadic people living on the land whereas it sounds like the Zulus and Xhosas had a lot more infrastructure?
They had mud huts and cattle herds. They'd already pushed the Khoisan (and Khoikhoi) out of all the good spots and into the desert, and the Zulus were very much a warrior people (think Klingons without the technology and you won't be too far off).
That's true. Hard for knowledge to be lost in the days of the internet, though. They might have missed that boat. If nothing else, people today can strategise on a large scale.
I'm nt sure they'd have properly realised that, yet. The Internet might well have taken them by surprise.
...he probably turned a bunch of Cardinals as time went along, trying to get a group that did what he wanted.
Maybe not. Maybe he doesn't feel that it's right to deny them Heaven, and he's really grumpy that he's been stuck here for so long.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
Ah, a classic dungeon bypass scene.
(I take it the aliens didn't have throwable explosive weapons...)
Umm. They must have, surely? But I don't recall any.
Hmmmm. Transmit, yes, but (a) I see nothing about receiving, and (b) all that is means is that if you really want to isolate it, you need a faraday cage.
Until someone figures out how to use a computer to transmit vibrations in the ground that can be picked up.... I just imagine AGI as being able to do literally anything because I'm probably not far off.
Anyhow, this is all irrelevant the point (which wasn't as clear as it should have been, for which I apologise). Yes, you can simply say that Sufficiently Advanced Magic allows control of someone by having Control Particles hit the retina - but you can equally well say that Sufficiently Advanced Magic allows control of something by having Control Particles hit the cornea.
If that's the case, then we're back to eye contact not actually being necessary - which could be fine, but maybe not.
a medusa-like Gorgon wears a full on burka and dark glasses to operate in society. I always wondered if it makes sense. I suppose with mirrored glasses you don't see any of her....
I am left wondering what her hair thinks about being trapped under fabric like that all the time. I'm imagining some seriously unhappy snakes.
I'm now wondering if she just had a "haircut" and had some seriously dead snakes, or if the snakes are just.... friendly and chill with the arrangement? Actually, if they were kept cold, they might just sleep most of the time anyway. Assuming snake hair has any actual biological similarity to actual snakes.
...lack of political representation is probably going to keep things pretty bad for them, unfortunately. I mean, lots of people will say the right things, but with little actual personal stake in the whole thing, plus they get most of the advantage in terms of votes by simply saying the right things without putting much effort into doing the right things... well, I don't expect them to put much effort into the actual doing.
Yeah. That's really depressing but all too true. We still don't have gay marriage here so we're surprisingly backwards. That said we've effectively had compulsory gay (and poly) common law marriage since 1999 so.... we're not all bad?
Probably won't. Let's hope the aliens are nice when they come.
Yeah, especially given that they're going to be several million years more advanced than us. (Maybe they'll have solved this problem already).
We can only hope.
I'm not sure about what the inter-tribal relationships in pre-colonial Australia were like. Generally speaking, we're dealing with nomadic people living on the land whereas it sounds like the Zulus and Xhosas had a lot more infrastructure?
They had mud huts and cattle herds. They'd already pushed the Khoisan (and Khoikhoi) out of all the good spots and into the desert, and the Zulus were very much a warrior people (think Klingons without the technology and you won't be too far off).
Yeah, apart from dingos (which are not actually native to Australia, they came with the aboriginies), the Australian aboriginies didn't domesticate anything. I'd be curious about inter-tribal warfare and that sort of thing. You'd imagine there'd be competition for resources if nothing else.
The Internet might well have taken them by surprise.
"What? There's a forum where people are sharing their experiences? Someone has run a controlled experiment on vombies and worked out that 24 carat gold produces the best results and silver does nothing? They've worked out that cammomile prevents restoration? How???"
...he probably turned a bunch of Cardinals as time went along, trying to get a group that did what he wanted.
Maybe not. Maybe he doesn't feel that it's right to deny them Heaven, and he's really grumpy that he's been stuck here for so long.
Oh god, you're right. "I have been damned and my soul has been destroyed. All I can do is make sure everyone follows the True Path". Maybe he ended up in one of the many christian offshoots from catholicism.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
Umm. They must have, surely? But I don't recall any.
Well, the Aztecs didn't have wheels. It's quite possible that some alien race may have managed to miss some fairly obvious application of technology.
(Similarly, it's quite possible that we have missed some fairly obvious application of technology).
If the aliens had throwable explosives, though, then their failure to design some sort of defence against them sounds like incompetence on the part of whoever designed those shield generators.
Until someone figures out how to use a computer to transmit vibrations in the ground that can be picked up.... I just imagine AGI as being able to do literally anything because I'm probably not far off.
Hmmm. Good point. The drives have motors, imbalances in said motors might be able to transmit some vibrations.
...simple solution - put the faraday cage on a space station. Have no other computer systems on board the station, apart from one very simple one that just maintains the orbit. Then there's nothing for it to vibrate to.
If that's the case, then we're back to eye contact not actually being necessary - which could be fine, but maybe not.
We don't actually need an explanation. We've got the rules for how it works - eye contact, separated by no solid objects and not more than twenty metres of air, and for five minutes the guy does what the vampire says.
The underlying mechanism is all done by magic.
I'm now wondering if she just had a "haircut" and had some seriously dead snakes, or if the snakes are just.... friendly and chill with the arrangement? Actually, if they were kept cold, they might just sleep most of the time anyway. Assuming snake hair has any actual biological similarity to actual snakes.
...now I'm imagining that she wears a very elaborate headdress - under the burka - containing (among other things) a small amount of ice and a battery-powered cooling fan.
And wherever she goes, people wonder what on earth that continual humming noise is...
Yeah. That's really depressing but all too true. We still don't have gay marriage here so we're surprisingly backwards. That said we've effectively had compulsory gay (and poly) common law marriage since 1999 so.... we're not all bad?
Our constitution has - since 1994 - had an important line about not discriminating against anyone based on race, creed, gender physical disability, sexual orientation (and I think there's some other things in there as well) except where there is seriously good reason (the example given being that one is allowed to refuse to give a blind man a job as a bus driver without running afoul of anti-discrimination laws).
The whole gay marriage debate isn't really that big a thing here, though. (Racism and corruption are much bigger - or at least louder - issues. At the moment, especially corruption.)
We can only hope.
There's also the question of why aliens haven't turned up here yet. I've seen all sorts of proposed answers to this question...
Yeah, apart from dingos (which are not actually native to Australia, they came with the aboriginies), the Australian aboriginies didn't domesticate anything. I'd be curious about inter-tribal warfare and that sort of thing. You'd imagine there'd be competition for resources if nothing else.
Google says there was a certain amount of inter-tribal warfare - most of which is not recorded because (a) the aboriginals had no writing to record it with, and (b) since they were hunter-gatherers, not farmers, they didn't have a firm enough base to stand firm against the British invaders and lost that war pretty thoroughly.
...I don't know if Google is telling me the truth here (sometimes it doesn't) but it looks pretty trustworthy this time.
"What? There's a forum where people are sharing their experiences? Someone has run a controlled experiment on vombies and worked out that 24 carat gold produces the best results and silver does nothing? They've worked out that cammomile prevents restoration? How???"
"As per our usual method, let's kill everyone who's been exposed to this information, burn all the paper, and wait a generation or two to see if it comes back. Jannissary, get us a list of everyone who might have seen this information."
"Everyone, sir."
"...everyone in the city?"
"No, sir. Everyone."
"...in the country?"
"In the world, sir."
"...no. No, that can't be right. Narrow it down a bit further for me, will you?"
Oh god, you're right. "I have been damned and my soul has been destroyed. All I can do is make sure everyone follows the True Path". Maybe he ended up in one of the many christian offshoots from catholicism.
If he ended up in one of the offshoots - which is not unreasonable - then presumably he would have left the Vatican at some point and set himself up somewhere else...
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
If the aliens had throwable explosives, though, then their failure to design some sort of defence against them sounds like incompetence on the part of whoever designed those shield generators.
The "bad guy" aliens in Stargate: SG-1 were known for being theatrical rather than practical. They had a slave population that was completely subjugated, and just ran wars against each other using multitudes of servant classes, so they did not really require "good" weapons. This is a classic scene from Stargate: SG-1 to demonstrate this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjlCVW_ouL8&feature=youtu.be
...simple solution - put the faraday cage on a space station. Have no other computer systems on board the station, apart from one very simple one that just maintains the orbit. Then there's nothing for it to vibrate to.
I'm still terrified it will figure something out though it seems to cover anything that we know about in our current science knowledge. That said, they're much smarter than we are, and maybe it would be conceivable to disable the faraday cage in some way? Maybe communciate in infrared by heating itself up?
We don't actually need an explanation. We've got the rules for how it works - eye contact, separated by no solid objects and not more than twenty metres of air, and for five minutes the guy does what the vampire says.
You got me there...
...now I'm imagining that she wears a very elaborate headdress - under the burka - containing (among other things) a small amount of ice and a battery-powered cooling fan.
Brainfreeze!
Yeah. That's really depressing but all too true. We still don't have gay marriage here so we're surprisingly backwards. That said we've effectively had compulsory gay (and poly) common law marriage since 1999 so.... we're not all bad?
Our constitution has - since 1994 - had an important line about not discriminating against anyone based on race, creed, gender physical disability, sexual orientation.
The whole gay marriage debate isn't really that big a thing here, though.
Not big because it happened long ago because of that nifty constitution, or not big because of the bigger fish to fry you were talking about?
Google says there was a certain amount of inter-tribal warfare - most of which is not recorded because (a) the aboriginals had no writing to record it with, and (b) since they were hunter-gatherers, not farmers, they didn't have a firm enough base to stand firm against the British invaders and lost that war pretty thoroughly.
Makes sense; you'd imagine there would be competition over resources. Almost a pity that they weren't more war-like. It's probably one of the reasons the Maori are ultimately more "successful" today.
"As per our usual method, let's kill everyone who's been exposed to this information, burn all the paper, and wait a generation or two to see if it comes back. Jannissary, get us a list of everyone who might have seen this information."
"Everyone, sir."
"...everyone in the city?"
"No, sir. Everyone."
"...in the country?"
"In the world, sir."
"...no. No, that can't be right. Narrow it down a bit further for me, will you?"
So the Jannissary - who happens to be a computer hacker - gets all the IP addresses who were on that forum and the vampire uses his connections throughout the world to have about ten thousand entire families murdered.
I'm imagining the post in /r/unresolvedmysteries now: "Over the course of two years, everyone who posted on a paranormal forum and their families has been killed. Coincidence or conspiracy?"
Oh god, you're right. "I have been damned and my soul has been destroyed. All I can do is make sure everyone follows the True Path". Maybe he ended up in one of the many christian offshoots from catholicism.
If he ended up in one of the offshoots - which is not unreasonable - then presumably he would have left the Vatican at some point and set himself up somewhere else...
Yeah. There are so many offshoots. I'm now reading about orthodox christianity and trying to work out what "changed the least", though of course every single branch basically claims they're the "best". I'm now reading about the East–West Schism and wondering exactly what would align with William's values, though not his current values but the vague values I assume he would have had in 1054. This.... is maybe not the best use of my time?
... I think William would most closely identify with Eastern Orthodox, because he probably wouldn't like the modification to the source of the holy spirit or the elevation of the roman patriarch over the others (then again, he's never really one for equality, and the roman guy is closest to france and all... but it looks like the roman see wasn't meant to have that power originally, and, well, usurpers are bad).
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
The "bad guy" aliens in Stargate: SG-1 were known for being theatrical rather than practical.
Ah, I see. They weren't trying to stop an enemy, they were trying to create an engaging and challenging war game in which only unimportant servant races were at risk of death or injury.
Fair enough. That does rather change the design specifications necessary.
I'm still terrified it will figure something out though it seems to cover anything that we know about in our current science knowledge. That said, they're much smarter than we are, and maybe it would be conceivable to disable the faraday cage in some way? Maybe communciate in infrared by heating itself up?
It probably could communicate in infrared like that - but who's going to be watching?
Communicating does nothing if no-one's listening.
Brainfreeze!
I hope that by now she's figured out the optimum amount of ice to have sleepy snakes without brainfreeze.
Not big because it happened long ago because of that nifty constitution, or not big because of the bigger fish to fry you were talking about?
Not big because of bigger fish to fry.
At the time that the Constitution was written, the big fish was that everyone (above a certain age) was suddenly getting to vote. (This was a very big fish, because something like 60% of adults had previously been barred from voting, split along racial lines). Racism has never really gone away, and remains an issue... though things are significantly better than they used to be, there are still problems.
And then, of course, the idea of the President getting rather involved on the wrong end of a number of corruption scandals is another big issue.
So... kind of overshadowed.
Makes sense; you'd imagine there would be competition over resources. Almost a pity that they weren't more war-like. It's probably one of the reasons the Maori are ultimately more "successful" today.
Yeah... probably.
I'm imagining the post in /r/unresolvedmysteries now: "Over the course of two years, everyone who posted on a paranormal forum and their families has been killed. Coincidence or conspiracy?"
If it gets that far, then (due to a little something called the Streisand Effect) the contents of said forum will probably spread faster than the jannissary can keep up with...
Yeah. There are so many offshoots. I'm now reading about orthodox christianity and trying to work out what "changed the least", though of course every single branch basically claims they're the "best". I'm now reading about the East–West Schism and wondering exactly what would align with William's values, though not his current values but the vague values I assume he would have had in 1054. This.... is maybe not the best use of my time?
Gasp! Creating the perfect history for your novel is not the best use of your time? How can this be?!
... I think William would most closely identify with Eastern Orthodox, because he probably wouldn't like the modification to the source of the holy spirit or the elevation of the roman patriarch over the others (then again, he's never really one for equality, and the roman guy is closest to france and all... but it looks like the roman see wasn't meant to have that power originally, and, well, usurpers are bad).
Right now, you probably know more about the subject than I do, and it sounds good, so feel free to go with that!
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
The "bad guy" aliens in Stargate: SG-1 were known for being theatrical rather than practical.
Ah, I see. They weren't trying to stop an enemy, they were trying to create an engaging and challenging war game in which only unimportant servant races were at risk of death or injury.
Fair enough. That does rather change the design specifications necessary.
Yeah, though they did use the same sorts of weapons against, well, Earth, and the other Even More Powerful Races they warred with. Then again, they didn't invent any of the stuff they used, so they were probably limited in what they could scavenge.
It probably could communicate in infrared like that - but who's going to be watching?
Communicating does nothing if no-one's listening.
Who knows. Use SETI? Could it make its infrared signal look like it's coming from a star and get them to download a virus? All speculative. But probably best not to underestimate unfriendly AI. Friendship is Optimal and all that.
At the time that the Constitution was written, the big fish was that everyone (above a certain age) was suddenly getting to vote. (This was a very big fish, because something like 60% of adults had previously been barred from voting, split along racial lines). Racism has never really gone away, and remains an issue... though things are significantly better than they used to be, there are still problems.
It's really amazing that racism can be so systemic in a place where the minorities are not actually in the minority... Though I guess it's not like that 60% was entirely one ethnic group, and it seems like all the groups probably were not big fans each other, so it's not a unified 60%.
Australia's indigenous population is a 3% demographic, so it "makes sense" that they've "got no chance". 4% Chinese, 2% Indian, 1% Fillipino, 1% Vietnamese - you basically end up with about 90% white.
And then, of course, the idea of the President getting rather involved on the wrong end of a number of corruption scandals is another big issue.
Hey, our former Prime Minister was involved in a scandal during his time in office too??
I'm imagining the post in /r/unresolvedmysteries now: "Over the course of two years, everyone who posted on a paranormal forum and their families has been killed. Coincidence or conspiracy?"
If it gets that far, then (due to a little something called the Streisand Effect) the contents of said forum will probably spread faster than the jannissary can keep up with...
What a great way for vampires to come out of the coffin.
"Yeah, so, a rogue vampire was acting alone - well, with his slaves - and has killed people who were looking into our weaknesses. As a show of good faith here is a publication of all our weaknesses. Please note that our political system works differently to yours, and fights to the death are not uncommon. Moreso, they're already dead so killing us isn't a crime. Anyway, the guy who ordered all that cold-blooded murder, this is where he's holed up, how about some people take care of that for us. I've got lots of allies all throughout the world who are thrilled that we finally have an opportunity to step out of the shadows and live in harmony with humanity."
... that's not going to end well.
Gasp! Creating the perfect history for your novel is not the best use of your time? How can this be?!
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 months later)
Yeah, though they did use the same sorts of weapons against, well, Earth, and the other Even More Powerful Races they warred with. Then again, they didn't invent any of the stuff they used, so they were probably limited in what they could scavenge.
...did these other Even More Powerful Races invent their own weapons?
Who knows. Use SETI? Could it make its infrared signal look like it's coming from a star and get them to download a virus? All speculative. But probably best not to underestimate unfriendly AI. Friendship is Optimal and all that.
Huh. That's... huh.
It seems implausible, but I can see the risk - it could send out itself as data, and just hope that someone, anyone picks it up and runs it to see what it is. Straight out of the box, no intermediate virus stage necessary...
It's really amazing that racism can be so systemic in a place where the minorities are not actually in the minority... Though I guess it's not like that 60% was entirely one ethnic group, and it seems like all the groups probably were not big fans each other, so it's not a unified 60%.
Any disunity in that 60% was more than capable of realising that their own differences were minor in comparison.
Yeah, there was definitely an imbalance there. The underclass had numbers on their side; but the overclass had resources and the ability to do quite a lot of bullying within the law (largely because they made the laws).
And, on top of all this, the entire country was under international sanctions over several years because of said policies (not that that did all that much to stop us, we had - and still have - a lot of natural resources. One of the few things we don't have is oil, which is what led to Sasol developing a way to make oil out of coal (we do have coal)...
Australia's indigenous population is a 3% demographic, so it "makes sense" that they've "got no chance". 4% Chinese, 2% Indian, 1% Fillipino, 1% Vietnamese - you basically end up with about 90% white.
...I see what you mean, yes.
Hey, our former Prime Minister was involved in a scandal during his time in office too??
Your politicians have tame scandals.
...want to swap?
What a great way for vampires to come out of the coffin.
"Yeah, so, a rogue vampire was acting alone - well, with his slaves - and has killed people who were looking into our weaknesses. As a show of good faith here is a publication of all our weaknesses. Please note that our political system works differently to yours, and fights to the death are not uncommon. Moreso, they're already dead so killing us isn't a crime. Anyway, the guy who ordered all that cold-blooded murder, this is where he's holed up, how about some people take care of that for us. I've got lots of allies all throughout the world who are thrilled that we finally have an opportunity to step out of the shadows and live in harmony with humanity."
... that's not going to end well.
...vampire war with Humanity taking sides?
Moreso, they're already dead so killing us isn't a crime.
"they're"? "us"? ...looks like he's not sure whether or not he's a vampire.
Ohhhhhhhhhh. So, it's not so much a matter of whether or not you should be looking up ancient Catholicism, it's a matter of whether or not you should be waiting until the evening before looking up ancient Catholicism.
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (2 months later)
...did these other Even More Powerful Races invent their own weapons?
All sorts. The Asgard (greys) and Ori have "energy weapons", the Furlings are Mysterious And We Never Meet Them, and the Nox are complete pacifists who are able to raise the dead among other things. Humans, when they get starships, tend to use railguns mostly from what I can recall.
The Asgard had a problem with an enemy that wanted to destroy their new advanced flagship and went to the humans for help because we came up with creative solutions. Our creative solution? Get their flagship to self-destruct and take the enemy out. I am not convinced the Asgard couldn't have done better.
It seems implausible, but I can see the risk - it could send out itself as data, and just hope that someone, anyone picks it up and runs it to see what it is. Straight out of the box, no intermediate virus stage necessary...
Hey, if it takes ten thousand years for some alien creature to run the code, we still end up with von neumann machines turning everything into paperclips inside a million years. I for one welcome our new office supply overlords.
Hey, our former Prime Minister was involved in a scandal during his time in office too??
Your politicians have tame scandals.
They don't, really. Probably tamer than yours, but the onion thing was funny.
...vampire war with Humanity taking sides?
Yeah. It would.... probably not end well.
Moreso, they're already dead so killing us isn't a crime.
"they're"? "us"? ...looks like he's not sure whether or not he's a vampire.
Shhh. I was writing it stream-of-consciousness. Or this vampire is part of the Red Tribe, and she wants you to kill the Blue Tribe vampires, so it IS an Us and Them type thing.
In JaNoWriMo news, I had dinner with my RP/writing partner and we've both gotten excited about it! We're going to have some serious roleplaying to do in the next couple of months so we have skeleton scenes to build up, and because we both have sets of characters who are basically a hair away from being full tulpas, we are going to also have to edit a lot of each others' scenes to make them work right.
I also kind of sort of explained 4D physics to her. She also expressed gratitude for your awesome work at helping me hammer this stuff out, she thinks we should write a "the physics of the verse" book about it.
But this is what we're going to do:
Me: Pretty straightforward romance story of Red and William. Act 1: They meet, fall in love (c. 1942). Act 2: Red becomes a ghoul, dynamic with that (c. 1950). Act 3: Red becomes a vampire, relationship almost strains to its breaking point (c. 2016). Act 3: Red is now a mature vampire, everything is perfect, the end (c. 2050). Probably going to have no or only minor antagonists. Good communication.
Her: Pretty straightforward friendship/action story with Jack and Gwyn. Act 1: They become roommates, wtf a vombie?!? Act 2: so we need to stop this vampire menace, wtf vampires are people with feelings?? Act 3: major antagonist. Act 4: Peace is achieved.
u/westward101 [+3] (a day later)
I think "thrall" is the more typical term for this than "ghoul".
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (a day later)
You're probably right. The whole general set of rules comes from a mashup of World of Darkness, Buffy, True Blood and general folklore, and I think we got the term ghoul from there.
We invented the word jannisary (well, it's a type of turkish elite guard, and we're using the word), so I might see about changing 'ghoul' to 'thrall' or something else, because you're right, the connotation is wrong.
Plus, it makes me think of this stanza from Keats's ballard, La Belle Dame Sans Merci:
I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!”
u/trekie140 [+2] (2 days later)
How difficult is it for jannisaries to resist their addiction? The psychology of drug addicts is complicated, which makes controlling them complicated. Vamps want reliable subjects. .
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (2 days later)
Thanks for the question! It's a good thing to think about and is another point in the "why don't they just have all ghouls all the time?" fridge logic column =/.
I don't know anything about the science of addition (probably something to research!), but I'd imagine the difficulty would be similar in kind but more severe in magnitude to whatever the 'most addictive'^TM modern drug. So you can get clean with enough effort and support (in fact, a plot line involves a main character trying to do so, though I'm not sure if she succeeds as of yet).
However, I'd imagine that jannisaries would for the most part be drug addicts looking for a bigger thrill, so they'd recruit each other (possibly out of a genuine desire to share a better high, possibly because the vampire encourages recruitment), or someone who graduates up the drug scale to the very top (is this a real thing?) and wants something better might seek it out.
u/trekie140 [+2] (3 days later)
I don't think "graduating up the drug scale" is a thing just because I've heard of evidence against the existence of gateway drugs. I haven't studied addiction much either, though my impression of it is that after the initial high it's less about seeking out a high and more about feeding an irrational desire. Drug addiction seems to trick the part of our brain designed to incentivize beneficial behavior, so it's very difficult to resist.
Additionally, the kind of people who actively seek out drugs to get high probably aren't the kind of people vampires would want to work with. Peons have their uses, but the best people to have in your pocket are the ones who can open doors. Politicians, police officers, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and professional criminals are all far more useful than random junkies off the street that the cops pay more attention to.
I just got an idea for some kind of independent jannisaries. The one advantage peons have is that it's easy to hide regular feeding, for VIPs you need to pay extra for privacy, so many of them could be used like gas stations for whoever is passing by. They're easy to manage and easy to replace. Some may even pay to get bitten as if it were a drug, though the more forward-thinking vamps prefer their food stay financially solvent so they don't have to find more.
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (3 days later)
Yeah, the second I realised I imagined it as being like 'graduating up the drug scale' I was like... I am totally talking bullshit, aren't I? I actually know a guy who used to be a drug and alcohol abuse councillor at a prison, so I might ask him for his perspective on this sort of stuff.
Additionally, the kind of people who actively seek out drugs to get high probably aren't the kind of people vampires would want to work with.
Agreed. I always imagined jannisaries as specifically a reliable food source, and if you wanted influence, you'd make a ghoul instead as they're more... controllable.
Problem is, with all this in mind, you end up back at my problem of why have jannisaries over ghouls/thralls. I suppose the psychic energy being a limited resource makes the most sense.
I also imagined vampires as being very protective of their jannisaries. They're an excellent resource in that they're a meal whenever you want it, but if you have to share them, they become infinitely less useful, especially because in order to get their high the jannisaries are likely to lie about being fed on in the past. In most cities this would take the form of vampires having 'territories', and you can only take jannisaries who live in your territory. It would have the counter-intuitive consequence of vampires tending to prefer the 'bad' parts of town. Individual jannisaries, though, would be out for themselves a lot of the time. And I do like the idea of truck stops literally having rooms of jannisaries in them, so vampires who are just passing through have an easy food source.
u/trekie140 [+2] (3 days later)
I thought there were already enough reasons to make jannisaries over thralls, the latter are more reliable but require more personal attention. Jannisaries are better contacts, while thralls make a great entourage. You'll probably have to play with the specifics of the addiction until you get something that will hook the kind of people that you want vampires to have. That will definitely effect what kind of story you're telling.
Currently, the only way I can think of to reach powerful people would be to have vampire prostitutes get to them and the addiction would just be strong enough to entrap most people, but that may not make for the kind of story you want. If jannisaries are influential, then vamps would also be protective of them to prevent their loyalties from switching. I've come to the realization that controlling people through a drug addiction is rather counterintuitive.
u/MagicWeasel [+2] Cheela Astronaut (4 days later)
Yeah, you're right. Thanks again for your input.
I did a little bit of research into the specifics of addiction and 'highly addictive' tends to gloss well with the established canon of jannisaries (instant gratification, especially).
The big problem is I want to have them be content waiting at least several weeks between feedings, but be desperate for them in short order after that, so it'll probably consist of huge initial high during the feeding itself, which is replaced by a more mild pleasant sensation for two to three weeks, perhaps including the sort of benefits that things like ritalin and modafinil provide to provide incentive for 'the rich and powerful' to take it, gradually fading into withdrawals that put you back below your baseline and then as time goes on get worse and worse and worse. So, say, six weeks after a feeding you'll be a little beneath your best, the headaches start after two months, and then three months in you've got basically the worst flu you've ever had and you just KNOW that the only thing that will fix it is that beautiful toothy beast.
Note to self: research drug addiction and withdrawal further
u/trekie140 [+2] (5 days later)
That sounds like a really good idea for how it all works. It also has the added "benefit" that jannisaries who get cut off may be inclined to seek out an alternative, so their new addiction makes a great cover for their old one.
u/MagicWeasel [+1] Cheela Astronaut (5 days later)
Thanks for asking questions!! I couldn't have done it without you :)
Maybe I'll post about my werewolves next Wednesday... My werewolves are super weird.
u/Nepene [+4] (2 hours later)
I'm writing a jumpchain fanfic, in major part to try and get used to writing a lot quickly. Would enjoy being used to writing loads, getting into a routine.
In the story you are taken to a fictional universes, use point buy to buy various abilities, and live out your life in said universe for several years. I'm trying to work out how they would play out the fairly standard eating pokemon issues- pokemon are clearly smart enough to understand language, handle complex issues, use tools to say, build a playground, and people on occasion consume them. I'm trying to work out how a person would justify that if questioned.
u/Chronophilia [+5] sci-fi ≠ futurology (3 hours later)
Whichever way you slice it, eating sentient beings is morally grey at best. That's fine, it gives room for discussion. Most likely everyone will justify it to themselves differently.
- I refuse adamantly to eat Pokémon and you should too.
- I refuse adamantly to eat Pokémon but I respect your boundaries.
- I don't want to eat Pokémon but I don't have the energy to argue about it with you.
- Nearly everyone else in this world does it, what difference will I make one way or the other?
- Nearly everyone else in this world does it, I should eat Pokémon to fit in.
- Nearly everyone else in this world does it, they can't all be wrong.
- Nearly everyone else in this world does it, so I never really questioned it.
- Pokémon are not really sentient so it's OK to eat them.
- I know and accept that this is evil, but they're delicious.
- I know and accept that this is evil, but I have enough problems of my own without worrying about Pokémon rights as well.
Basically, just rehash the reasons people think it's OK to eat meat and you'll get most of the possible justifications. That's what this is an obvious allegory for, anyway.
u/Nepene [+2] (4 hours later)
Thanks, this helps lots. I can flesh out their conversation more.
u/Cariyaga [+1] Kyubey did nothing wrong (3 hours later)
Also there's the option of pokemon legitimately not being sentient, as in DaystarEld's fic.
u/whywhisperwhy [+2] (6 hours later)
On a side note, how does that work? How can you have a non-sentient, non-sapient creature that's also psychic?
u/Cariyaga [+4] Kyubey did nothing wrong (6 hours later)
A natural, species-wide talent, I'd guess. There're plenty of examples of such things in other media; just check out any D&D monster manual.
I'm sure there's a disconnect between what I'm thinking when I see psychic -- telekinesis, telepathy, whatever -- and what you are. If your issue is with telepathy, you could consider it, to the creature in question, a kind of non-visual body language, because that's probably what it feels like to them.
u/None [+7] (7 hours later)
[deleted]
u/kaukamieli [+2] (7 hours later)
Alakazam has IQ of 5000 and is said to be highly intelligent. Not that IQ is measurement of sapience or anything, but to add to the discussion about intelligence.
u/Cariyaga [+2] Kyubey did nothing wrong (8 hours later)
I'm not sure I'd trust the pokedex. It says that Magcargo is hotter than the surface of the sun.
u/callmebrotherg [+3] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (9 hours later)
My favorite headcanon is that the pokedex entries were written by you, the ten-year-old kid.
u/Cariyaga [+2] Kyubey did nothing wrong (9 hours later)
Yeah, I've always liked that one too.
u/whywhisperwhy [+1] (8 hours later)
That's in canon Pokemon, though, which had sentient Pokemon.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+3] Finally, everyone was working together. (42 minutes later)
First, an apology. The first chapter of Collateral Damage was supposed to have been up by August 6th or 9th, to coincide with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That simply did not happen. The plot was mostly fine, but it was causing tone whiplash. I'm still deciding if it's salvageable or not.
The bigger problem is the fact that I still feel like I know nothing about nuclear weapons, their history, properties, or broader things about nuclear physics. Maybe complete accuracy is a terrible standard to impose. I know it doesn't really help the story, but I really, really wanted to keep actual, accurate physics in the story, and not only go halfway.
How do you worldbuild around such complicated topics in a timely manner? How much study and research is "enough" and how do you extract it from history and science books? I feel like someone who tried to walk across a frozen lake, fell through the ice, and drowned.
u/Gaboncio [+3] (7 hours later)
Ask someone. I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I'm hoping to start doing research on solar physics in the next few months. I know a little bit more about stellar cores than nuclear bombs, but I may be able to help, or point you in the right direction for what to google.
The more niche and specific your questions are, the better.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+1] Finally, everyone was working together. (10 hours later)
Ah, perfect. Solar physics is a big part of it too. I'll PM later.
u/None [+2] (5 hours later)
The first thing I would recommend for learning nuclear history would be http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
I don't know how much research is "enough." There's got to be a cut-off point somewhere. Personally, I would settle for internal consistency. Throw a disclaimer in there somewhere and exclude real nuclear physicists from your intended audience.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+1] Finally, everyone was working together. (5 hours later)
This is /r/rational. The concentration of people who can hold a conversation on nuclear physics is incredibly high.
u/whywhisperwhy [+2] (6 hours later)
If anything, involve those people even more during the writing phase.