Talk To Glowfic Characters

[alicornucopia]

So we've started answering comments in "How To Read Effulgence" in character, and that's not really the ideal platform for those conversations. This is! You may address characters here and we may opt to answer in character. You will get a kind of loosely "backstage" out-of-continuity version of the character (in continuity proper, you cannot talk to them, since you aren't there) and if you want them at a specific (past relative to where we're writing) point in time, feel free to specify (e.g. "Addy in 1932", "Shell in her box", "the Joker while committed", "Minus right after he woke up from turning", "the alethiometer on the subject of 1207").

Any glowfic author may use this thread to receive questions.

You may also be interested in Make My Characters Talk To Each Other.

Comments

[andaisq]

Has the Peal met any of the late-stage Bells for whom Shell Bell was confused as a child? (Besides Golden.)

[she_sells_seashells]

I often don't have enough information to tell for sure, but apart from Golden no one's an obvious candidate. Maybe Glass, since she was at least a princess before meeting the peal and I did get called "Highness" instead of "Majesty" a couple of times. I'm positive that we haven't met everybody, though - none of us meet some of the descriptions.

[andaisq]

What kind of coin would it take to cure an individual shren? To eliminate whatever magical factor causes shrenness? To fix the draconic infant mortality rate? Would it even be possible for the last one, or would it be a Bad Idea on the level of interfering with the Thilanushinyel magic problems?

[thaumobabble]

See my answer over here. It's not a particularly bad idea to just add dragon magic to the available supply, and you may do it with an evil in sufficient quantity to result in any naturally-occuring result along the spectrum of draconicity for any target including a shren, perhaps even in batches. Permanently fixing the situation to accommodate any growth in the dragon population would require either an edit to how the species works - which would be dangerous, and there aren't any Elcenian unicorns to consult the way there are in Thilanushinyel - or altering the way the magic supply works, so it's rapidly self-regenerating instead of a finite pool.

Minnie

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Glass or Juliet, is Minnie the ghost from Sunshine templatey?

Re: Minnie

[thaumobabble]

A little bit, not that much. She's green, too.

[shoaling_souls]

Kas, you should know that I nicknamed my kitten Button because of how you called Helen 'Button' and because he is cute as a button. It is not the kitten's real name, but it is one of his names.

[truthwright]

That's adorable. <3

Avatar Bells

[bells_jokers]

When Beila gets pealed are the rest of the Bells be able to hex the bending? Will they be able to do more than one? Is the Avatar four set Avatar only? Also, will bending work in other worlds?

Re: Avatar Bells

[alicornucopia]

We haven't established answers to these questions. My instinct, though kappa may disagree, is that there is a single genetic marker for bending and you can wish one but only one; the Avatar Bell is genetically an airbender and her ability to do the other three is a spiritual matter that would be less readily wished. Bending will work in other worlds unless they share that inconvenient property of the spirit world.

Questions like this might better belong under the How To Read Effulgence thread, since characters don't currently know the answer.

Phoenix

[bells_jokers]

Phoenix, what would you do if you came across a wizard or witch using a memory charm on a muggle? Or any other type of harmful magic?

Re: Phoenix

[occluminous]

It might depend on what else I knew about the situation. I'm not exactly a duelist. If it was just a memory charm and not a curse or something and I didn't think the wizard would escalate to other kinds of violence, I might try getting physically in the way and try to talk them out of it, since I know they can't affect me. If I thought they were doing it illegally instead of just unethically, I might try to get a sensible grownup, like Mrs. Stark or Healer Song or one of the good teachers. If I thought I could talk an elf into helping without the elf getting hurt I might call an elf. If it was really bad I might ask an elf to get Feral for me again, but I'd have to be pretty sure the wizard needed to be dead to prevent something worse from happening. I don't know anything about whether I can block bad spells with my Patronus or something; I should experiment with it.

Deductions

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Silver Streak, when Clarity Bell visited your rehearsal how could you tell she had already looked over the food?

Re: Deductions

[clearthestorm]

Smell.

Video Games

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Hey Elena, (Orfeo's sister if there's more than one) (a couple months after your brother left for Eos), I heard you like video games. What's your favorite genre? Are there any kinds of games you can't stand? I don't understand the appeal of 'simulator' games, personally. I found a truck simulator once. You... Drive. Yay?

Also, anyjoker, I think you guys would like Thermite. Dangerous substances might be redundant with all the pain magic and pyrokinesis and whatnot floating around, but Thermite is basically rocket fuel. It could be a new flavor, at least. That stuff will burn through tank armor.

I'd be interested to know how well a single-hex regen power resists a line of burning thermite across a forearm.

Re: Video Games

[alicornucopia]

Elena: I like rhythm/dancing type games and the adventure sorts of things with nice scenery and complicated swordfighting. I have no patience for platformers.

Light Tag.

[theonebutcher]

Dear Aianon,

Would you like to meet in an unbelled World, give me flight, durability and a power to make illusionary blasts of light and have a mock aerial battle in New York?

Dear Pattern, what would you say to us doing that in your World?

Re: Light Tag.

[endragoned]

That sounds like fun. Why an unbelled world, in particular?

Memory search engine

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Elspeth, I remember hearing your power provides essentially a memory search engine. So I'm curious... How many times have you personally ever laughed?

Golden etc, does Bell standard perfect memory work the same way (mental google)?

Rapunzel, are magic plants' magical tastes separate things from physical taste? Does mind-moss still taste like moss?

Re: Memory search engine

[her_imperial_radiance]

What counts as a "laugh"? I do that thing where I exhale slightly more emphatically than usual or say "hmm" while smiling a lot.

Question for an Elcenian

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Gyre (from Elcenia series, native of Barashi), what did you end up making for your Masterwork?

Re: Question for an Elcenian

[alicornucopia]

I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I'm leaning pretty heavily towards a Senate circlet for Ryll.

[lambda_root]

Queen Isabella, can you contact Winter through your scepter?

[deepest_magic]

No. It only works between friends, like Father Christmas said.

[lambda_root]

Astrid: After a haircut, are the cut-off bits of your hair food or not? How about fingernail clippings?

[bulrushes]

I guess I could eat them but that would be weird and the hair would get stuck in my throat.

Resurrections

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Anybell who has gotten around to mass resurrections, have you bumped any interesting historical figures in the queue? Even relatively recent ones, like Norman Borlaug, who died a few years ago in my Earth? What reasons do you typically have for bumping people in the queue, aside from specific requests via friends and family?

A while ago someone concocted an elaborate fight scenario for Golden that she found terribly un-clever. I'll try not to do that here, but I want to know the kind of things Pattern might have done if she DID find something interesting in Forks.

Pattern, what would you have done if, about a week after arriving in Forks, you were in the woods for some reason and an alien spacecraft crashed near you, plus one dead humanoid but obviously not human alien? The spaceship contained recognizable features like an airlock and cockpit, was still mostly in once piece including non-secured (no password) computers in alien language, was easily entered, and crashed in a location that is not easily locable unless you saw it go down, and was about the size of a trailer home. No strange stories about UFOs or space objects appeared in the previous or subsequent weeks.

Re: Resurrections

[bellfounding]

I haven't bumped famous people just for being famous. I figure that famous people will want to wake up to family and friends like anybody else, so I wait for someone to request them for personal reasons and demonstrate that there's someplace for them to go (even if that's "I'm pretty sure Grandma would be happy to live on Saturn"). But the famous are pretty easy to check for benign status, so there's that; Norman Borlaug and his wife went home with a couple of their kids years ago in my world. I shook his hand.

I'd buy a big chest freezer and a generator - or maybe just dry ice and a box, I'm not sure which would turn out to be cheaper, it'd depend on how much fuel the generator would eat keeping the freezer going - and haul them out to keep the body frozen with a view to eventually getting a good look at it with more sophisticated tools and more information, and then do my best to find the alien equivalent of a calculator app, learn the numbers, and go from there on figuring out how to read the contents of the computer. Plus checking out what else there was in there.

Knife Throwing

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Anyjoker who is interested and squishy, could you have a knife-throwing (and knife-dodging) contest and tell me who wins, and who has the most fun?

Portals.

[theonebutcher]

You can coin portals, do Aura's leak through portals? Do portals create shadows in Auras? Do they in gravity?(Higgs Boson hints that they should, because it strengthened the Standard Theory) Could you extent the reach of an Aura over a whole planet by imbuing all grains of sand with picoportals, or does that dilute the Aura too much? Can Aether do it?

Re: Portals.

[subtly_artistic]

What sort of portal are you talking about? I imagine we could coin any number of designs of things that technically count as a portal. My aura cares about line of sight and distance, though, not necessarily intervening space-folding, so whether a portal would let me spread it around farther would depend on other factors even if the portal "let aura through". I certainly can't comment on "gravity".

yseult, jane, linyabel

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Yseult, how do you pronounce yseult in English?

Jane, do you know why you are female as opposed to not having gender or being a boy ansible network?

Linyabel, have the haut madebsignoficant progress on 'natural aging'?

Re: yseult, jane, linyabel

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Augh, typos. "Made significant progress"

[daniel_h]

Glass, how would you react to seeing an individual or template change moiety? I think there was a Matilda who was briefly green, but I can’t find where. How surprising would finding other moieties be?

Lazarus, when you learned that ingots always beat coin, you only knew about stars. Now that you have coins literally a thousand times stronger (and, though I can’t think of any more-pain-tolerant Jokers you’re likely to meet soon, may get 11s or higher at some point), are you still sure coins can’t beat ingots ever? If so, could you please try to explain what you “see” that tells you this?

Sarion, it is my current understanding that very young elves are socially allowed to ask questions. As I have an interest in linguistics, I would be interested in the reasons your language even has a grammar for questions. The process by which elf children acquire this part of the language would also interest me. Finally, an honest assessment of my ability to politely converse with members of your species other than yourself would make good hearing.

[thaumobabble]

Seeing someone change moieties would surprise me - I'm not confident it never happens but watching it in progress, especially in someone templatey and therefore strongly moietied, would be deeply strange, and of course I don't know what moieties mean.

Finding third or further moieties would also surprise me, but not as much. I'd expect them to come from worlds we haven't visited yet - we already observe different ratios of purple and green in different worlds (most Aurum residents are green, for instance, and we haven't found anyone green in Apollo yet). So I'd be less floored to appear to check out a brand new world and find that it was full of people neither green nor purple.

[daniel_h]

Aether, once you graduate, do you think you might be able to help Voice? Voice, what do you thinknof the idea?

Lissa, Glass, and Liselen: have you noticed Lissa being more strongly connected to the Wild Magic than your average human (in addition to or related to Glass saying she’s somewhst shiny)? Lissa, did you hear the Admin’s theory on shinyness, even if it can’t explain the “somewhat” part?

Jill Callahan, if somebody were to conjure a person (like Sarion did with the eggs or Kas did making himself pregnant), would you have any say in who they turned out to be? If you wanted to instamtiate a template, would that be a possible way to have that happen? What do you think of everything Bella’s done or had happen to her so far?

Bar, how often are permanent changes like the Belltower made to your world? Has the various time-syncing the peal does inconvenienced any of your patrons? What’s the oddest thing you’ve done that you can easily remember (by whatever you would consider odd; obviously this differs from my definition in that I find leaving the room less odd than making stuff out of thin air)? How often do you help with things like, say, arbitrage? Can you make/dissapear things other than on your top surface? What would it look like on a standard 2014-Earth credit statement to buy something from you? Most importantly, are you on the brainphone yet?

[daniel_h]

I forgot to ask Bar how much information she gets about people’s tastes. For example, there was a time she made a minty drink in response to a vague request. The recipient thought it was fantastic, but I hate mint so much I probably wouldn’t be able to drink it. What information do you get which would prevent you from giving me that particular drink, or prevent you from giving an Alex the spice she thinks tastes like soap?

Prime magic

[daniel_h]

The Primes, working together, can make the King immune to all Prime powers (even ones that the current Primes don’t have, like possibly mindreading for the current King). Can they do this separately, or as something other than a coronation ceremony? I’m thinking it might be useful to let people get within five feet of you.

Re: Prime magic

[calescent]

I think it requires doing the handholding thing and can't be done separately. It could probably be done as something other than a coronation ceremony but would not traditionally occur that way because the monarch wouldn't like to have lots of people all empowered to resist prime magic running around when the primes support the current holder of the position.

[daniel_h]

Addy, you seem to be willing to put up with plenty of inconvenience in the name of magic. Why not ask Golden to put you under a geas of good behavior, or some other method of making you trustworthy (maybe even a Maggie-enforced promise would do, but I doubt it), and then be allowed to explore magic more fully. I doubt it would be too difficult to make the peal trust you enough to, say, learn Speech—assuming you actually are trustworthy.

Cam, have you tried talking to wishcoins? Are they at all intelligent? Does it make a difference who minted them or in what world? What about denomination? Can they answer questions about what wishes they can grant? Also, Aletheia’s interactions with consciousness are different from standard, I think; have you checked if anything there is intelligent in the same way things in your world are? That… might actually be a good idea for all non-Downsidable worlds, now that I think of it.

Amaraiah and Kas, can wishes make the alethiometer better (working while outside Aletheia, working on things outside Aletheia, etc)? Can they give intuitive reading like Kas has, and if so what size coin does it take?

[taste_tester]

Oh, she hasn't found any methods of doing that which she likes and trusts against my creativity.

[daniel_h]

Glass, there was a discussion at the space plant Bell party about fiction books matching some templates, like Strat or a Matilda who Alice met. You weren’t present for the discussion, and those there decided you might not be able to see much relevant but do you know anything about how that kind of thing happens?

Alice (the Joker, not the precog) I completely don’t remember you meeting a Matilda in Milliways. Was she able to do magic? I understand not wanting coursework to be too easy, but I’d certainly pay that price if it allowed me to do magic! And while I’m asking you questions, do you personally mind the name “Whistle” even sfter the rest of the Deck discarded it? It gets annoying having to keep specifying which Alice I mean.

Strat, I can’t remember if you ever checked what your daemon would be. Is it the canonical mongoose, or something else?

Sherlock of Arceus, I get most of your ’mon names, but why You?

[thaumobabble]

Sorry, I only see metacausality of worlds as a whole and of people, I don't get anything if I look at the books. I can sort of see that there's space made for this trait in both the Matilda and Sherlock templates, somewhat differently, but just like I see commonalities within templates when they're standing right next to each other this would be easier if copies of the book contributed anything, and they don't.

Bella

[erinflight]

How important are other people to you? You seem to be altruistic on a large scale, but not with necessarily with specific individuals? If you are selfish why do you care so much about making a better world? How far does you altruism extend?

Re: Bella

[luminous_regnant]

Selfishness leads to possessiveness leads to a desire to optimize leads to something that can be quite accurately summarized as altruism. We determine how far our resources will stretch, claim whatever we can claim with those resources, and then it's ours. If it or its contents suffer, this reflects poorly on us and is not what we had in mind when we claimed the thing in the first place. If it thrives, then everything's going according to plan.

We will be generous with specific individuals when we can, but it's usually not as efficient as other things we could be doing unless the person is personally close to us, useful towards our projects in their own right, or very cheap to help. The first because we do benefit (both directly, and in terms of our efficiency at doing things) from having a personal support system; the second for obvious reasons; and the third because it doesn't divert many resources we could be deploying to help other people more or in greater quantity.

In my world, history textbooks dwell more on my forcible conversion of the vampire population to vegetarianism - but I saved more people's lives by bankrolling a massive release of sterile male mosquitoes until the malaria-carrying species were extinct. Doing the most good does not always mean helping whoever's nearby; people who are nearby are just often more convenient to learn about and offer aid to.

Sometimes other people will acquire a level of priority that means we can't trade them off against other things calmly. In my case, I would be unable to function on a high level without Edward, so I must prioritize his safety over even things which are objectively more important because I cannot succeed at plans which calls for securing things in reverse order - and because I am selfish, and he's even more mine than my world is, and more essential to my personal happiness.

But when we want other things badly enough we can make enormous clear-minded sacrifices for them, like Sarion did.

They're still for us, just for different parts of us.

Template Sweeps

[daniel_h]

As I understand it, the state of the art in sweeping a world for templates is to send a brainphone whitespace message to “This universe’s instance of [template]”, which should be unnoticeable in most cases and should tell you if it works. Presumably, this procedure is repeated every so often in case new people are born, although we’ve only actually seen that happen when Jane’s gone down for a while. Am I correct about this? If so, then I have some followup questions for whoever wrote the most recent brainphone update. If not, then what is the state of the art for this process (and the followup questions should be for whoever’s most appropriate to answer, probably Jane)?

I’m curious how this will work in edge cases. Some of these edge cases I strongly expect you to encounter because there are worlds that have or will soon have those edge cases which I expect you to encounter; others I do not expect to happen any time soon, but am still interested in. I have shuffled the order of the questions to avoid revealing extra information to those who might not wish to know.

1. Suppose there were two instances of a template in a world (such as if they used local forking magic, although that’s not the only possible way); how would that work? Would they both get blank brainphone messages, would the process fail, or what?


2. So far, you’ve seen a lot of odd stuff around althood: standard alts, face doubles, circumstance alts, etc. What would happen if somebody were, say, a half-instance of a template (a half-alt of other instances)? Would your definition of “alt” find such a person? Would you want it to?


3. So far, all of the Bells you’ve encountered were able to use the brainphone, but that doesn’t seem like it should be a universal. Even if no Bellish or other power stops voluntary use of the brainphone, a use like this might register as an attack (and certain similar magic powers could certainly be used in such a way). Would you necessarily be able to tell the difference between “failure: target person nonexistant” and “failure: magically blocked”?


4. Suppose you’re using this procedure and find a Lazarus. Would they be able to tell something magical had happened? Would any other magic-detecting power you’re familliar with?

I’m sure there are more edge cases, including one I forgot while writing up the others. Have you had somebody carefully check to make sure the procedure works as intended and won’t alert somebody to their being sweeped by startling them instead of by your more careful introductions once you find them?

Re: Template Sweeps

[mind_game]

Whitespace brainphone is it, yes. There might be more elegant methods, but this is one I can do without intervention from somebody else and without having to move my coin-use-capable Device body around. I check every three hours when I'm up, just in case, as a routine maintenance task. So far nobody's been born while I was looking.

1. If you're not specific enough about who you're trying to brainphone, the current version has an adequate error handling system to tell you that that's the problem. So if there were two or more of someone, I'd notice, and someone could go check it out.

2. Currently we don't know about half-alts and our magic doesn't define half-alts as within tolerances for althood. We probably wouldn't find any blends or fractions with the standard sweep method.

3. Not necessarily, but we do tend to have a reasonably good assessment of what magic comes with a universe, and the local Bell usually has the state of the art in mental defense. We'd try other means if we found a Bell who couldn't brainphone or needed magical patching to do it, since this would make it likelier that somebody else would hide from the sweep. It's pretty uncommon for us to find worlds without making immediate non-sweep-based contact with a local Bell.

4. Maybe. This isn't a really big deal, though. Most of the people we're looking for we might as well talk to; the bad-news templates we'd be more careful before tracking them down in a world with really threatening magic levels.

Blank text brainphone messages are confirmed highly unobtrusive.

Jane Error Messages

[daniel_h]

Jane, I apologize if this is a sensitive subject, but I’m curious about the error messages given when you interacted with Materia unprotected.

What do the numbers mean, what do the messages mean, and what do they have to do with each other? I could figure out some of them (like the 3 blind mice or the PEBCAK), but was completely stumped by at least one of those three aspects of most of them.

For reference, here are those errors again, along with the worlds in which they appeared:

Sunshine, 559

cannot reticulate splines

Yggdasil, 6008

missing 1s in binary code

Apollo, 2

cannot count

Helios, 909

out of memory, all alone in the moonlight

Milliways, 0

problem exists between chair and keyboard

Atlantis, 3

blind mice

Rainbow, 112358

inferior pattern recognition

Wellspring, 18920

cannot connect to monitor lizard

Aurum, 99

bottles of beer on the wall

Alethia, 7788

lycanthropy

Re: Jane Error Messages

[daniel_h]

For an example of what I’m asking, Jarvis said that “cannot reticulate splines” is a reference to a video game where one of the loading messages was “reticulating splines”; presumably if reticulating splines is impossible, then at some point something will go wrong. I am unsure what if anything it has to do with being error code 559, though, or with this being the Sunshine world. Similarly “out of memory, all alone in the moonlight” is a play on “out of memory” computer errors and the song Memory, but bears no obvious relation to the number 909.

On the other hand, “error code 99: bottles of beer on the wall” is an obvious reference to the song, with the error code number and explanation making sense together, but doesn’t have an obvious reason of being a computer error.

So, my questions are, for each world above with their given error code and error message:

1. Does the error code number have a relevant meaning, like 112358 does as a Fibonacci reference?
2. Does the error message have a relevant meaning, like “cannot reticulate splines” or “problem exists between chair and keyboard” does as a type of joking error. If so, what?
3. Does the combination of code and message have a relevant meaning, like “error 99: bottles of beer on the wall” being a song reference? If so, what?
4. What relation, if any, do the above meanings have to computer errors