scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/7zo8mf.md

## 5 minutes version of Luminosity?

* Author: u/None *
* URL: 
* Score: 12

* Created: 2018-02-23T14:03:35

### Post:

[deleted]

### Comments:

> **u/TooShortToBeStarbuck** [+22]  (3 hours later)
> 
> [Obviously a spoiler](#s " Luminosity is actually two separate novel-length works. In the first one, Bella gets turned into a vampire under controlled circumstances, using painkillers to keep her unconscious for as long as possible, although they wear off before the end of the transformation. She and Edward used preserved eggs that Bella had harvested, and with the help of a human surrogate who formerly worked for the Volturi, they have 'Renesmee,' who in this version is named Elspeth, and who has the ability to be completely believed, as long as she's saying something which she believes to be completely true. Bella visits the Quileute tribe's adult female members and activates their werewolf transformation deliberately, as a way to empower them to protect themselves from the Volturi, who Bella accurately anticipates are going to make a move to disband the Cullens for amassing too much power and too large a population of vampire in one location. Bella's mind-read-proofness turns out to be a uniform shielding ability that makes her immune to a lot of things, including death pretty much, being able to rapidly reconstitute her body after it has been categorically reduced to particulate matter. The Volturi attack, using mind control to force the werewolves to work for them. A large part of the narrative is spent with most of the main cast believing everybody else in the main cast are dead, while Elspeth is temporarily being raised by Rosalie, Emmett, Carlisle, and Esme, who believe Bella and Edward to be dead, and Jasper and Alice to be disappeared or captives to the Volturi. Bella *isn't* dead, and she kidnaps Elspeth back from the Cullens, going on the run with her. There's a lot of recapturing and escaping and recapturing and brainwashing and memory stealing and memory-giving-from-what-was-stolen. The overall story ends with all of the Volturi dead except Marcus and Alec and Adelaide, Marcus' wife Didyme 'resurrected' through the use of memory transferral, and Bella categorically the uncontested ruler of the entire supernatural world - and, implicitly, the human world since she has future-readers and the like at her disposal. This actually manages to happen in a way that makes her authority believable and not completely odious. At the end of the story, the only 'good guys' who are 100% dead - and not memory-resurrected like Didyme was - are a few werewolf original minor characters who died before the memory-resurrection ability was discovered. Alec willingly uses his powers to 'numb' people through voluntary vampire transformations, so that it isn't painful at all for them. A bureaucratic system for allowing people to voluntarily become vampires is introduced in stages, and Carlisle is doing R&D on blood substitutes so that a vampire population won't destroy the human population just by being hungry and dangerous. There is never, ever, at any point in the story, a love triangle featuring Jacob and Bella. I'm forgetting a lot of things that were original to the fic and really quite novel and clever, but I've covered the actual plot, and those clever things were more... mechanisms that advanced the plot.")
> 
> I think that about covers it, and yes, this is the VERY CONDENSED version, even if it ran a little long. Luminosity and its second half are an incontestably huge body of writing.

>> **u/RynnisOne** [+8]  (16 hours later)
>> 
>> That sounds... absolutely atrocious.
>> 
>> I wish I could give you more than one upvote in thanks for the time you've saved me not reading it.

>>> **u/thrawnca** [+5]  *Carbon-based biped* (20 hours later)
>>> 
>>> Did you enjoy canon Twilight?
>>> 
>>> Luminosity was basically an AU of the whole Twilight series all in one, with Radiance being an entirely new story (a necessary one, since the end of Luminosity is a big cliffhanger). I liked them for different reasons. Luminosity has an interesting alternative take on Bella and Edward forming a relationship, and Radiance has the whole transhumanist angle going on. Actually, perhaps the biggest issue with Radiance was that the climax failed to follow the Unspoken Plan Guarantee; we see characters plan things out, and then things largely go according to plan. I still found it worth my time.

>> **u/None** [+1]  (7 hours later)
>> 
>> [deleted]

>>> **u/TooShortToBeStarbuck** [+5]  (7 hours later)
>>> 
>>> [More spoiling, of course](#s " Heaps of lgb-but-not-t all over the place. Nothing recognisable as polyamory; the vampire pair bonding gets treated as an immutable thing that happens instantaneously upon encountering your mate for the first time, with dramatic psychological effects that Bella and Aro both demonstrate contempt for, despite themselves having mates, because they don't like being cosmically manipulated that way, nor having their mental health tethered to someone else's survival. The vampires who want children universally use human surrogates, then turn the surrogates into vampires after birth. This is treated as a voluntary but incentivised process that can fast-track getting turned into a vamp, if that's what one is seeking deliberately. Regarding the thirst thing, it was basically one part 'eating animals instead of humans gives you better self-control,' one part 'if you know in advance you're going to be a vampire, it gives you better self-control,' and one part 'Carlisle is doing R&D on the blood substitute, but in the meantime we've bought out a bunch of slaughterhouses of livestock.'")

>>>> **u/thrawnca** [+2]  *Carbon-based biped* (20 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> Plus, Bella's long-term goal [is](#s " to populate the world with vampire-human hybrids, who generally enjoy blood but don't have the same compulsion and can eat other food.")

> **u/dalr3th1n** [+9]  (6 hours later)
> 
> Now let's try for a 5 minute version of Effulgence!

>> **u/Ephemeralen** [+8]  (a day later)
>> 
>> Bella acquires a Joker.
>> 
>> Bella uses Joker to become all-powerful.
>> 
>> Bella encounters plot.
>> 
>> Plot is derailed or obviated by Milliways.
>> 
>> Repeat 9000 times with fun variations?
>> 
>> (It's actually not that samey, I'm just being flippant because it so huge that anything would look samey at the necessary distance to see the whole, but it does have a LOT of anti-climactic resolutions with plots that die out or get fixed before they go much of anywhere. The good parts, and there ARE a lot of really good parts, like The Assault on the Alethian Afterlife, for example, are kind of buried.)

> **u/ToaKraka** [+4]  *https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png* (3 hours later)
> 
> I haven't read it in several years—but, IIRC…
> 
> —Bella gets injected with vampire venom, becomes a vampire in record time, gets the mystical vampire bond of love with Edward, and has a daughter by him.  
> —For some reason (to gain allies against the Volturi, who eventually will discover the breach of secrecy and attack?), Bella decides to investigate the possibility of an alliance with werewolves, specifically female werewolves among the members of a particular USAian indigenous tribe. (Heretofore, all known werewolves have been male, but Bella hypothesizes that, because only males with the werewolf gene ever were exposed to vampires (in battle), the females just never had the gene triggered, despite carrying it.) She has lunch with an old female friend who is a member of the tribe in question. Her new vampiric status triggers the friend's werewolf gene after extended close contact.  
> —The friend blabs to her mother, who entices Bella to make *her* a werewolf as well. However, the mother is pregnant, and she nearly dies when her fetus transforms within her.  
> —The Volturi find out about Bella's dealings with the werewolves and send a task force to eliminate everyone involved. Bella is the sole survivor (by some fluke like hiding under the ashes of her comrades), while all the Cullens are burned and all the tribe members (werewolves and not) are killed. Due to being a super-cool rationalist, Bella avoids suffering the standard fate of a vampire who loses her mystical mate (catatonia); instead, she forces herself to continue living for the sake of her daughter.
> 
> I personally found *Radiance* significantly more interesting than *Luminosity*.

>> **u/Ristridin1** [+7]  (9 hours later)
>> 
>> A few things that are off:
>> - The fetus transforming is not a thing. One of the new werewolves hurts her father in a fit of rage, forcing Bella to turn the father to save his life. Said father soul-bonds to his wife, and impregnates her while she is still human. The mother nearly dies due to giving birth to a half-vampire.
>> - Bella doesn't survive due to a fluke; her mind-shield protects her to the point of reconstituting her body (it protects her mind, and her mind can't quite survive without a body, can it?)
>> - The Cullens don't die. They break ties with Bella in order to be safe from the Volturi. Edward obviously can't (soul-bond), and gets killed (or at least, that's what Bella thinks).
>> - The werewolves and their imprints don't get killed either. They just get mind-raped into serving the Volturi (except a few who manage to escape). The non-werewolves do get killed though.

>>> **u/Zeikos** [+1]  *Communist Transhumanism* (4 days later)
>>> 
>>> >Bella doesn't survive due to a fluke; her mind-shield protects her to the point of reconstituting her body (it protects her mind, and her mind can't quite survive without a body, can it?)
>>> 
>>> I remember her surviving, but I do not recall her being de-facto immortal.

>>>> **u/Ristridin1** [+2]  (14 days later)
>>>> 
>>>> After being cut to pieces and set on fire:
>>>> 
>>>> >> I tried to pull it in, willed it to put out the fire, come on, shield, if you want my mind safe you have to let it have someplace to live - the mind is not safe without the body - 
>>>> 
>>>> >> The shield sucked in closer to me and the fire was out and I was violently rearranged into my normal shape.
>>>> 
>>>> Bella doesn't quite recover immediately; she's essentially helpless for some period of time after that, but it seems pretty close to being immortal (it's beyond the usual vampire immortality at least). I imagine that she could still be killed if her enemies were aware of that trick, since it seems to take a lot out of her.

>> **u/None** [+1]  (4 hours later)
>> 
>> [deleted]

>>> **u/mathemagical-girl** [+7]  (22 hours later)
>>> 
>>> This went really long but idk how i could have significantly shortened it. It's a long book and a lot happens. 
>>> 
>>> So radiance opens five years later. Bella and Elspeth (her and Edward's child, who is effectively a teenager, because half vampires grow super fast) are constantly on the run, to avoid the anyone noticing elspeth's rapid growth, and the attention of the vulturi. Elspeth was originally living with her grandparents Carlisle and Esme, but Bella happened across her as a toddler and kidnapped her. Elspeth has a power to make her truthful statements very hard to disbelieve, as well as to project her memories by touch. 
>>> 
>>> One day, bella smells a wolf, and they are subsequently ambushed. One of the wolves, Jacob, imprints on elspeth, and kidnaps her. they are shifted into a sort of Ethereal plane by a human witch named Pera. She, along with a handful of wolves and their imprints and children, live in pera's parallel dimension, also on the run from the vulturi. They are the only wolves that haven't been mindfucked by the vulturi into subservience. Cody Clearwater, Bella's childhood friend's half vampire little brother is there too. Jacob, who is the alpha of their little pack, won't let Elspeth  leave the 'hiding place', but they make their way to her rendezvous point with her mother in New York City. They meet up, and Pera moves Bella to the hidinf place, but turns out, Pera is Bella's singer, and she loses it and attacks her. Pera sends her back but now Jacob doesn't trust her. Then everyone is ambushed by the vulturi, and taken prisoner, because Cody betrayed them for a shot at reconnecting with his siblings, both werewolves in the employ of the vulturi.
>>> 
>>> Elspeth wakes up in a vulturi prison cell, there's a half vampire girl there named Alliria, with the power to seem completely unimportant, but that's hardly relevant. Elspeth escapes somehow, but how is unimportant. She discovers that the vulturi are keeping uncooperative vampire witches (including the not dead Edward and Alice) imprisoned in pieces so that a new recruit, Adelaide, can steal their powers. They reform the witches and hold a mass breakout. Edward takes Elspeth to help find Bella, though after Chelsea snipped away all of his connections, he doesn't feel any affection for her any more. He does still feel some connection to alice, since he was always in telepathic contact, they couldn't completely kill that relationship. They all three go to Nashville where Alice's mate Jasper is living with a couple friends and eating people again. Then all of them head to Denali to rendezvous with family, but are again betrayed to the Vulturi.
>>> 
>>> This time, Elspeth ends up in a super friendly underground werewolf village. It's a much more effective prison, given that they already magically killed her connections to her mother and family, and the place is relatively pleasant, if you ignore the fact that everyone is magical cops for the evil vampire illuminati. She stays there for some time, and Addy, the power copying witch, trains her to extend her powers. She learns to send made-up memories, to send incomplete ones (such as only audio, for sending telepathy), and eventually, to compress them instead of sending in real time and she even develops range for her power. 
>>> 
>>> During one training session, Alec, the sensory deprivation field witch, knocks them out. Presumably they weren't fond of the work Elspeth was putting into undoing Chelsea fake relationship building. She calls out to Jake, while Addy sends an undirected blast of all of her memories at everyone in range (i. e. basically the whole main vulturi compound). This includes all of *Aro's* memories as well, up to the point they last touched, due to Aro's power and her's both working automatically by touch. Everyone is so overwhelmed that they're totally knocked out, except Jacob who is too focused on saving his imprint. Jacob, Elspeth, and Addy escape. 
>>> 
>>> This is where things get real interesting. Part of Aro's memories is how he murdered one of his fellow vulturi lord's wife. When that guy recalls that memory, shit will definitely hit the fan, so our heroes head to ireland were Maggie (a vampire friend of the family) and her mate Gianna, the now also vampire who gave birth to Elspeth on behalf of Ed and Bella, and their daughter, Molly, live. One thing leads to another, and they call a big meeting of vampires from the british isles to discuss the vulturi problem. When Addy smells Siobahn (who it is said has a witchcraft of making her plans come true, though she argues she's just a good strategist), she immediately touches her and runs cackling off into the distance.
>>> 
>>> Anyway, much of the rest of the book is plotting and scheming. Eventually all the friends and allies of the Cullen Family end up in Denali, and are plotting to overthrow the Vulturi. The biggest threat is the vampirized Pera, who can hide *parts* of people now. They use alice's vision projection power to show her single vampire dudes in hopes of sparking a mate bond. It works. The teleporter guy goes there, they go to the hiding place, and fuck their way back to alaska. With her on their side, prospects are much better, and their combined forces invade the vulturi compound. Elspeth runs through the werewolf village, deprogramming everyone as she goes. Yadda yadda yadda, lots of fighting and excellent strategy, bada bing bada boom, the vulturi lords are all in pieces.
>>> 
>>> Bella makes a new government from the ashes of the old, using Pera as an actually effective prison warden to enforce the 'no eating people' rule, and Alice to monitor it. She's basically untouchable on account of a body guard, who nobody can quite remember who it might be. Everybody who isn't dead and is useful gets fanciful titles.
>>> 
>>> We cut to years down the road to the Cullens ruling the world. Elspeth finally meets her human grandparents, though Charlie doesn't seem keen on immortality. The Golden Coven is trying to push vampirism as a desirable cure for, well, everything, and with the royal anesthetician Alec blocking out the pain, and Elspeth projecting movies for entertainment, the historically 'not fun' turning process is practically pleasant. The masquerade slowly falls since people aren't required to lie under pain of death any more. And everyone who wasn't killed lives happily ever after.

>>> **u/ToaKraka** [+1]  *https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png* (8 hours later)
>>> 
>>> Paradoxically, I seem to have a worse recollection of *Radiance* than of *Luminosity*, even though I've read *Radiance* two or three times and *Luminosity* only once. I can't help you.

> **u/thrawnca** [+3]  *Carbon-based biped* (15 hours later)
> 
> Basically, Bella is much more self-aware and thoughtful, and achieves through deliberate planning pretty much everything that canon Bella achieved more or less through luck, [until](#s " the Volturi suddenly invade, break everything up, burn or scatter her family and mind-control the werewolves.") Then [Radiance](#s " reveals that the 'killed' vampires were actually imprisoned in order to borrow their powers, and Bella organises a coalition to bring the Volturi down and establish a new world order, with vegetarianism and hybrids.")

> **u/Nadaesque** [+1]  (7 days later)
> 
> I enjoyed it.  It really brought out the sociopathy inherent in the character.  It's an enjoyable read, because it featured some of the less-appealing factors of the character (as originally written) overlapped by the parts of the rational mindset that can be ... troublesome.
> 
> You get a Bella who doesn't spend a lot of time in self-doubt or wondering "is this the right thing to do?"

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