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

Another Question for Glass

[daniel_h]

Does your aura work through past-sight? If so, I was wondering what you saw when looking at the very beginining of the conversation between Minnie and Juliet here. I’m thinking of something in particular, which I believe you’ll be able to see and will be interesting to watch but may be very subtle, but if you see anything else you consider worth mentioning I’d be interested. You might also want to check out Juliet’s first conversation with Minnie (here) and whatever she’s up to now, for comparison.

I’m not just talking about how she caught templateyness (unless that happened in the first conversation I mentioned), although if you can use your aura with pastsight and can catch her doing it, I would like to know if you can describe what that looked like.

Re: Another Question for Glass

[thaumobabble]

Aura doesn't work through pastwatching.

Reform draconic

[bells_jokers]

I am not sure if this is the right place to ask questions about "Amounts of Dragon" and Mial. Sorry in advance if so.

What does Shrennaki translate too? And the other words? Why do dragons find them so unsettling?

Re: Reform draconic

[alicornucopia]

This is a fine place.

Not all of these words have appeared in published Elcenia stories before and some of them were made up specifically for this thread/Reform Draconic.

Leraal words:
sisaak: dragon.
e'sisaak: dragonish.

Draconic words:
siad: dragon.
siaddaki: awesome, glorious, spectacular, cool, in the particular way characterized by dragons (Elcenian).
shren: an abhorrent condition occasionally occurring in the children of dragons, symptoms being inability to fly in natural form and irredeemable terribleness.
teah: miracle; the only possible cure for a shren, what with the terribleness being irredeemable and all.
sirasiad: Draconic.

Reform Draconic words which Draconic cannot accommodate:
siahr: Any member of the group "dragons and shrens".
sirasiahr: Reform Draconic.
shren: A siahr who cannot fly in their natural form.
shrennaki: awesome, glorious, spectacular, cool, in the particular way characterized by shrens.

[calledtoventure]

Mial, could we please have a word/loanword from Reform Draconic for a person who is not a siahr?

[thisvorlunatic]

Is 'non-siahr' not doing it for you as a construct or are you just curious or what?

Question for a Minor Character

[daniel_h]

Paul S. Washington, defense attorney, about a week before hearing about the Delaney Hammond case:

Dear Mr. Washington:
I realize this is probably an unusual question, but I believe it should not be; in fact, I think most potential clients should ask it. Let us suppose that somebody were to hire you to take on a case (which subsequently went to trial), but between the hiring and the trial something were to happen to you. For example, you might get extremely sick, or you might suddenly get a bout of insomnia and not get any sleep for three days before the trial, or you might be unable to review the evidence properly due to computer trouble. All of these, and other misfortunes, are beyond your control, but could render you temporarily less able to represent clients well. Would you ever decide that you were temporarily unfit to represent a client, and if so, what would you likely do in such a circumstance?

---

Paul S. Washington, defense attorney, about a week after the Delaney Hammond trial (as in canon, not having received the previous correspondence):

Paul, what were you thinking last week? I understand you had a run of bad luck; that’s beyond your control. What I don’t understand is why you still represented Mr. Hammond at the trial. In your condition, many clients (although probably not Mr. Hammond himself) would have been better off representing themselves than being represented by you in that condition. I think you could probably have gotten yourself excused from the courtroom for health reasons (but as I am not myself a lawyer I am not certain), giving a delay in the trial and perhaps costing you potential pay from Mr. Hammond if he decided to go with somebody else in the mean time. As it is, your client got 15 years in prison, had his parental rights terminated, and had to pay three million dollars. I’m not sure what happened to you, but expect it was worse than the lost pay would have been. Were you fired from your firm? Disbarred?

Re: Question for a Minor Character

[alicornucopia]

[I kind of regret that entire plot element and don't actually know shit about how lawyers work. Sorry.]

[daniel_h]

Stella, upon having ready access to stars via Alice:

If you were to learn that the key to using stars safely is one of those obvious-in-retrospect things, what ideas would you have on what makes stars safe? If you were further to learn that the correct hypothesis comes with a safe experiment, so it could be tested without potentially losing half your body, what ideas would you test? Finally, what if you were to learn that coming up with the safety procedure did not require actually knowing why high-value coins were dangerous, and the “why” is a lot less obvious than the “how to get around it”?

Also, can you pentagon expertise in wishcoins-in-general? Since pentagons give information, even if they aren’t that good at it in many cases, it seems like you might want to try that. Stars would be useful.

---

Stella, after learning (via Lazarus) that an amount of magic equal to the previous coin’s value goes to something (maybe futility-related) other than the wish:

Same questions (except the last, which I expect to have the same answer).

---

Lazarus, no particular time as long as he knows the declawing secret:

When a coin is declawed, does it then have more magic available for the actual wish, or does the magic that would have been destructive just go away? Also, it seems like large coins have more than ten times the power of the next-largest coin; about how much more powerful are they?

---

Glass, can you see if you’re likely to run into any alts of Lazarus who are some form of bird? Can you tell that this is actually a potentially metacausally interesting question, and if so can you see anything about why it is?

[[I ask because so far they all use the same account, and having a bird screennamed nonbird would be odd]]

[thaumobabble]

Stella is not available to answer your questions because hindsight bias is a hell of a thing even for authors.

Lazarus looks reasonably likely to turn up as some form of bird if we find a species of bird people otherwise compatible with Lazarosity. Now that you mention it, there is a minor air of bird theme to him.

Milliways Doorables

[daniel_h]

Glass, I’ve been meaning to ask for a while: if Milliways replaced a witch-door (not a witch-door in a Jarvis or other sentient building, as that would add further complicating factors, just an ordinary witch-door), would you then be able to open that door to Milliways thereafter? I’d expect so, and that the only reason you were cut off during Jane’s second failure was that this had never happened, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if I were wrong.

Although, Jarvis–Enchanted Forest, this does make me wonder if and how you can handle the witch-doors. I’d expect you could fully handle them (with my next guess being that you can only open them to wherever they were last opened). If so, is controlling their destination anything like opening a door to Milliways?

---

Anybell, the brainphone (v1) was originally designed to be extensible to nonsentient things, with Stella specifically thinking of potentially adding a sewing machine interface to it. Has this (adding something nonsentient in general, not necessarily a sewing machine) ever happened? I was thinking I’d want to add it to my computer as a more-secure SSH, but that would be redundant with and inferior to Jane inhabiting most of the computers anyway (especially now that she swears she won’t break again).

Cam, have you added anything that, if from another universe, would be nonsentient? For example, any stars you’re friends with? Does it work as expected?

---

Jane, how would you feel about a competition where security experts tried to design systems you couldn’t eat, and then you tried to eat them anyway? You broke all the security in your native world, but Jarvis was able to spit you out (although I don’t know if he’d be able to succeed if you were trying to eat him anyway. I also don’t know how I never realized before that at some point in the discussion about you interacting with Jarvis, the metaphor got reversed); I also strongly suspect there are (even in my relatively-in-the-past world) theoretical nonsentient security protocols that could stop you, even if they haven’t been used competently or implemented bug-free.

Re: Milliways Doorables

[thaumobabble]

Witch-doors need to have rooms installed into them; they won't automatically acquire a new destination if something else interferes. They won't keep Milliways accessible any more than a normal door.

Lost Pen

[daniel_h]

Pen, did you tell Cindy what John in Milliways told you, about always finding doors on his birthday? Did you describe that guy to him at all? John can find doors on a regular basis, so might be your best chance at getting home, and I don’t remember you mentioning him to Cindy.

Re: Lost Pen

[campanas]

We talking about it front of Cindy.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Admin, how if at all were small children processed Downside, in the pre-Bell era?

[ending_of]

Small children were usually either held unsorted or sent to the high side of the cliffs.

[daniel_h]

Cam, you asked a tree about eating fruits, but did you actually talk to any fruits about it? I imagine that they might feel differently from the tree, although they might also be grass-level intelligent.

Secret, I have no questions for you at the moment, but I still need to tell you something. The user name I am using is a shortening of my true name. I do not remember whether orders work via writing or not, but I thought I should tell you that just in case.

(After the above paragraph, but separate from it to avoid the Queen learning about Secret) Queen, I know not your true name nor have I fed you. The situation is symmetrical; you have not fed me, your power does not extend to nonfairies, and my profile name is not clicking into place for you so it must be false. Despite this lack of ability for either of us to compel the other, I would request that you answer a question I have for you, and that you do it honestly. In the very beginning, you earned loyalty in addition to vassalage primarily be being kind instead of cruel. Over time, you gradually started using far more cruelty and far less kindness. Do you really prefer it this way? Even if your court had to shrink temporarily, might you prefer to switch back to kindness?

[lifes_sake]

The fruits are super stupid. Food, generally, is stupid; the difference is that some of it is stupid when it's growing and some of it has to be killed to become stupid.

Lots of Questions

[daniel_h]

I had some questions I came up with during the Effulgence Mafia game. I didn’t want to actually ask them here because I came up with them for reasons relating to the game. Now I have a giant backlog because I never got around to posting them and instead just kept adding to the backlog. Would you prefer I post my giant backlog all at once?

My questions that I deliberately didn’t post during that game were:

Chelsa, suppose you could live on a small planet with only yourself, Amdon, a bunch of other people very similar to yourself and Amdon but with different histories, and some other people that all knew about your kindling in advance and agreed to live there with you. You would be unable to kindle or douse anybody who did not explicitly agree to this and live on the planet with you, but everybody you could easily talk to would be fully kindled for each other. Would you want to live there? How many other copies of yourself-and-Amdon would there need to be on that planet to make you want that?

Chelise and Chelsa, did you have any cousins? Chelsa, the one I’m thinking of would probably have something like your kindling and dousing, but they would kindle hatred instead of love. Chelise, I’m also curious if you had any friends with a name like “Afton” or “Amdon” or something.

Re: Lots of Questions

[warmfeelings]

That wouldn't be as nice as having all the billions of people from back home love me, but I bet some of those people would agree to follow me there. I guess it would be about as nice a place to curl up and slowly die as this little island I'm living on now.

I had a cousin like that once.

Questions for Relatively Minor Characters

[daniel_h]

Since I didn’t get an answer to how to ask my backlog of questions, I figure I’ll make several posts and sort the questions into categories.

Ekador,
Now that you know stories of Welce using magic are actually true, do you think you may have heard any other true stories about countries using magic? It seems that other countries should at least have developed some sort of analogue of drawing blessings, even if the Primes are the only example of one person having more obvious magic.

---

Elias Frobisſher, at a Time ſuch that he had made the Book on magickal Powers and the Fourth-Coin encircling it, and placed them in their Location as of the Turn of the Millennium,

Firſt, I apologize if this Miſſive is difficult to read; I am familiar with a Dialect of Engliſh different from that in common Uſe during thy Time. I would like to make an Inquiry into thy Motives in certain Parts of the Creation the Book for thy Deſcendants, and the Encircling of ſaid Book with a Fourth-Coin. Due to the Nature of the Place where thou placeſt the Book, a deſcendant of thine, upon the Diſcovery of the Book, may poſſeſs ſome Injury, and may make a Wiſh concerning ſaid Injury inſtead of for the Power to produce Coins. Even if this Fact about the Location was not true at the time thou placeſt the Book there, and thou couldſt not have predicted the Change, the Diſcoverer of the Book may have a different Wiſh in Mind. It ſeems likely that the Diſcoverer of the Book might make this different Wiſh before reading about how it would inſtead be poſſible to make a Wiſh to be able to produce Coins.

Mayhap thou kneweſt of this Poſſibility, and placed a Reſtriction on the Uſe of the encircling Fourth-Coin ſuch that it could be uſed only in ſuch a Manner as to cause the Uſer to gain the Power to produce Coins. If that is the caſe, however, why didſt thou not include in the Book the Information that ſuch Reſtrictions are poſſible? If thou didſt not know that a Coin could be reſtricted by wiſhing, upon a Coin of equal Power, for the potential Uſes to be limited, why didſt thou not endeavor to hide the Fourth-Coin with which thou intendeſt thy Deſcendant to gain this Power in ſuch a Place as to be ſure thy Deſcendant would have read enough of the Book to learn of this Uſe? By Way of Example, thou couldſt have enſured that at leaſt one Fourth-Coin would be in the Place where thou hidſt the Remainder of thy Coins, as pointed to in the Book, or thou couldſt have uſed a Third-Coin to enſure that the Fourth-Coin would be hidden until the relevant Paſſage of the Book had been read.

---

Aspret,
How are you doing these days? Still enjoying being a duck?

---

Liselen, what would happen if wishing tried to increase the supply of elf magic, without giving it to anybody in particular? What if Lazarus and/or you helped?

---

Dear Harley Andrea’s biological mother, did you ever send that email asking for your son back? [Or, if not enough time has passed in that world] do you intend to send that email asking for your son back?

---

Dear Ranata Ekamma,
I was reading about Helen’s childhood, and I got curious: why do witches wear white silks when they separate? Are there other occasions where clothes other than black silks are supposed to be worn?

Re: Questions for Relatively Minor Characters

[pyrophyte]

I've never heard anything to indicate that countries other than Welce have an effective tradition of blessings.

Questions for Relatively Major Purples

[daniel_h]

Trouble shortly after his hospital stay ,
In the conversation you had with Bella about a button making pain a neutral warning, you said that you liked the intensity of pain. Suppose that the hypothetical button, instead of replacing pain with a simple neutral warning, kept pain intense but made it neutral instead of negative (like a roller coaster can be intense, and in itself is neither positive nor negative but can be interpreted either way by different people or the same person at different times). What are your feelings on that hypothetical button? Also, suppose you ran the numbers and found that more people commit suicide from too much pain than there are masochists of any intensity (I doubt that’s correct, but it’s a very clear case and you’re the one who brought it up). Then, when it was clear the numbers came out against you, would you push the button? Would you feel differently about Bella pushing the button if all the other avenues of hypothetical exploration didn’t pan out and you knew she knew those numbers?

---

Trouble,
How do eating and morphing interact? You implied that you can't eat in morph indefinitely, but presumably you don’t die of starvation if you get trapped in a morph. Can you survive comfortably for a week or two on the amount of food necessary to feed a bird while still maintaining the ability to morph back?

---

Miles,
At some point in the nearish future, you will acquire an immortality method (with tunable parameters from “just unaging” to “completely invulnerable to physical damage”, and will also come with the option of “reset to perfect health if something would otherwise kill you”). You will also get foolproof resurrection. You will also have the power to stop Jackson’s Hole cloning without the use of these methods (although, more likely, you will not have the ability to use those power because your wife or brother will beat you to it). Will you truly fulfill your promise to Baron Fell and grant him immortality or at least longevity?

---

Kas, how do roller coasters work in your world? Is there a large fraction of the adult population who are just completely incapable of riding them, or are they somehow able to compensate a variety of unseparated dæmons?

---

Brilliance,
You once said, “If somebody knows something, and they think that if I knew it that would change how I act in ways that I’d like better but they’d like worse, so they make sure I don’t find out, then they’re not my friend and if I trust them I need to stop”. I know my credit card number. I think that if you knew my credit card number you might sometimes use it to buy things (especially if this happened before you got access to minting), which you would like better than the alternative but I would like worse. I even have a reason to think this: a lot of Jokers take up theft, and although I don’t think you were one of them it would not surprise me if you were. I attempt to hide my credit card number from people. I assume this is not the kind of thing you mean; what’s the difference? How do you feel about the majority of Bells at one point preventing Jokers from finding out how to declaw high-level coins?

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Purples

[thisvorlunatic]

I'd find a way to get it to him without revealing where I got it from, if we weren't revealing the multiverse to the galaxy at large yet.

Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[daniel_h]

Aether,
You spent much of your break on telekinesis practice, “playing with various common objects” so that afterwards you knew “where to apply her light taps of force to get them to behave”. That sounds dangerously close to experimentation. Am I misunderstanding how your world works, and it would only be dangerous if you tried to extrapolate from “push a door far from its hinges” to “use the concept of leverage to start an industrial revolution”?

---

Amariah,
Have you checked on the Clouded Mountain since you got back?

---

Stella,
How easy is blocking somebody on Mars? Can you unblock, assuming the other party doesn’t have you blocked, just as easily? I can see it being useful when navigating a crowded situation: “the subway teleportation system is overtaxed today and the Empress hasn’t had the chance to fix it yet, so I’ll block the people in my way and unblock them when I’m at my destination” or “the concert is too popular for all the people attending, so I’ll block the guy who’s sitting in the seat I want, and unblock him once the concert’s over”. Is this possible? Do you have a better way to handle that kind of problem?

---

Shell Bell,
When Shell was in the box, she had various “fantasies” which were at least partly true. If answering this wouldn’t be too distressing, how accurate were they?

---

Angela,
Most of what the Samarian settlers did seems misguided, but potentially sensible given this misguidance (of course they could have done better even so, like by having two people or all oracles know about Jehovah, but the concept of redundancy isn't clear to everybody). However, I do not understand why Jehovah was programmed to destroy Samaria if there's a year with no Gloria. Is it just a threat to prevent the Sinai oracles from telling? I doubt that’s the only reason. Obviously it was better to get rid of that command, but if you also don’t know why it was there you might want to see if it was fulfilling some other purpose you can fill better without the threat of violence.

---

Rose,
Beast told you that the witch who imprisoned him told him how to break the curse. Is that some requirement with enchanting, like how having a cooperative channel helps, or was this another aspect of Beast's imprisonment that just doesn't add up (like why his brother thought he was entitled to Beast)?

---

Cam,
Did you pentagon away the habit of talking in your sleep? Would it have been dangerous to keep it while being fluent in the Speech? Do other Bells also do that?

---

Rapunzel (before meeting Rolan),
Under what circumstances would you find it acceptable for somebody to read your private notebooks? For example, if you were to suddenly disappear while Gothel was away, would you mind if she read the very end of your latest notebook in case that had a clue about why?

---

Other Bells, same question as for Rapunzel above (but without the example which doesn’t apply to them)

---

Glass,
You said that freecasting was a skill that theoretically anybody could learn but practically only Jokers could learn in a reasonable amount of time. If it’s a mundane nonmagical skill, is it pentagonable?

---

Amariah,
Outside of Alethia, if a human gets a certain type of brain injury, it can temporarily or permanently affect their personality. Is this true within Alethia too? Does it affect the dæmon in any way?

---

Glass,
I would expect that the President of the United States elected in the year 2000 is the same for, say, Origin and for Queenie's world. Would he technically count as a template, or as part of the Earth template? If you look at one of them, can you tell a difference between them and, say, the monarch of your country of birth (who is not at all a template or repeated anywhere in the known multiverse)?

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[subtly_artistic]

By and large practicing skills is okay. I took notes, but I didn't do any of it numerically and avoided trying to derive any truly general principles.

Questions for Bar

[daniel_h]

(these are categorized separately from the questions for Greens because that worked better with the organization scheme in my head)

You can sell arbitrary (nonliving nonmagical nonweapon) things. Can you also buy arbitrary (nonliving nonmagical) things, or only things that are used as a currency somewhere? What about buying weapons?

---

You have some exceptions for the "nonliving" clause for things like yogurt. How far does that extend? Could you make maggot cheese or gagh? A houseplant that somebody was going to actually take care of (you refused to make one which would be immediately sacrificed, but that sounded more like policy than inability)? What about microbes as part of some nonfood thing, as long as they were not microbes likely to cause diseases?

---

Why can't people order poisonous substances for use other than poison? Presumably you can make belladonna, and would serve it to somebody with a nonhuman biology. Presumably the clothes you gave Shell Bell are not edible. You'd probably even serve a standard human a whole apple complete with seeds, or even apple seeds directly if the customer was going to plant them. Why can't Amariah get spell components?

Re: Questions for Bar

[alicornucopia]

I can buy things - including weapons - effectively at my own discretion.

I am generally able to make exceptions to my rules when they result in items generally understood in their home contexts to be potable or comestible. I sometimes make other exceptions as for houseplants, especially if this is some kind of unavoidable necessity for a patron. Microbes are usually allowable if they are safe.

There is some discretion available in the case of poisons too. In the home context of witch spell components it is not unheard of for them to be used deliberately as poison.

Questions for Groups of People

[daniel_h]

Everybody you care to answer for,
If you had to get a dæmon and separate, but were not in a hurry to do it (like Kas) or had the weight of tradition for how (like witches), how would you do it? I would probably go with some quick method like teleportation, but that concentrates the awful and I know others would choose other methods.

---

Dear various Sherlocks,
I know that some of you are good at impersonating your Tonies (this was shown in Resplendence, but I assume it holds in Effulgence). Is that only the clones, or does that apply to all of you with Tonies?

---

All Joker Retirees, separately:
Where did you get those scars on your cheeks you had during your Gotham days?

Re: Questions for Groups of People

[pythbox]

Various Sherlocks, collectively: We are all that good.

Various retiree Jokers: [creative lies their player is too tired to invent right now]

[daniel_h]

Golden,

I’m writing to you because I think you know better than I do how to ask my questions politely. Allirea dislikes nicknames and considers them “for children”, and I’m curious about her attitude in more detail. For example, does she object to nicknames for the purpose of disambiguation (such as my calling you “Golden” above, or the more common case of me going by “Dan” sometimes when working closely with somebody else named “Daniel”)? What about if the user of the nickname knew about a magic system where somebody’s true name was relevant, and preferred not to give away their true name for that reason?

[luminous_regnant]

You may or may not be surprised to learn that her opinions don't hold up that well to detailed scrutiny or edge cases. She calls me Isabella, she'd call you Daniel and use last names if necessary to disambiguate, that sort of thing. She would be exasperated by a situation in which some more compelling reason existed to use a nickname and would probably prefer to absent herself. (She has almost always had the option of simply not interacting with anyone who was mildly inconvenient for any reason.)

[elcenia question] Question for an Aleist priestess

[rockeye_stonetoe]

I'm curious about the details on Aleism's definition of which foods are proper to eat. The pieces I know is "only things that come from plants or animals" and "drinking things not made by plants and animals is okay"

What about... food that was raised without real food, such as meat from an animal that grew eating conjured grain?

Re: [elcenia question] Question for an Aleist priestess

[alicornucopia]

Animals which have been fed conjured grain are still faei under most interpretations, although most nunneries will not serve them to the nuns.

Questions for Howlett

[maggie_of_the_owls]

Peace is described as an X-Men and Ender's Game combination, and you seem entirely consistent with a hypothetical years-later version of a Wolverine from at least one X-Men canon. So my questions are:
1) Did versions of the other X-Men and (presumably) metacausally linked persons used to exist? Now that your world is linked to Downside, is there a Professor X and a Magneto and Phoenix and Cyclops and what have you in the catacombs?
2) If so, what happened in the meanwhile? It certainly sounds as if mutations in Peace are less strong, or at least less dramatic, than that. Otherwise I imagine the buggers would have been much less of a problem.

Re: Questions for Howlett

[pythbox]

Howlett declines to answer your questions because he's grumpy and doesn't want to talk about his dead friends. Some form of the X-Men did exist, but they may have had a different exact lineup and/or different/nerfed powers.

Some random questions

[daniel_h]

Vampire!Juliet, do you still care about the three questions? What about the fourth one? The answers presumably changed a lot, but I think you might still be curious.

Addy, you talk so much about helping others with their powers. Have you ever tried to expand your own? Is there any reason you haven’t been able to develop range, or making it voluntary when a replacement happens, or the ability to hold multiple powers at once? Your power, on the face of it, sounds fairly extensible, yet you said it has not changed since you turned.

Addy, what [i]were[/i] you doing with Joham before being picked up by the Volturi? It doesn’t seem like there was anything at all important there that would have concerned you. Are you even sure yourself?

Glass, can you see why Golden had a living grandmother when she moved to Forks but most Bells don’t? My guess is some sort of “attractor drift”, where attractors can change (in the same sort-of-metatemporal way that templatehood can be contagious). However, I don’t know how strong a force it is (but would be surprised if it were literally zero even if it is negligible) and I don’t know if that’s the case here anyway.

---

Harley, you compared Felicity’s constant fear to the constant pain of turning. Do you know if mate loss might also be a good analogy? If so, it seems like it might have explained things to Golden better: she was approximately functional when she thought Edward was dead, but not in any shape to do anything complicated. If not, could you explain why that would not be a good analogy?

Mial, I know you get asked this a lot and are probably tired of explaining it, but I only saw the explanation you gave to your family (who know you far better than I do) and am still confused. As far as I can tell, the only difference between shrens and dragons is the ability to fly in natural form (now that you got rid of contagion). Maybe I have a bit too Bellish of an attitude to understand (I assume the adjective translated even if you don’t know much about Bells), but I don’t get choosing not to have an ability, even if you would never actually plan to use the ability. The only cost I can see is a cube-star miracle, and those are quite cheap given your pain tolerance (and offered for free anyway). I understand that it’s about beating sirasiad, but to me it seems like inventing sirasiahr does a more than adequate job of that. Do you think you could try to explain it to somebody who didn’t grow up around you for several decades? If practically every siahr started speaking sirasiahr natively, would that get rid of all of the remaining reasons for staying a shren except inertia, or would there still be more to it? Also, this should go without saying, but given your other mail should probably be said anyway: I understand that staying a shren is completely your option, as would be switching to siad, switching to human, changing species every other angle (as long as you found somebody, such as yourself, willing to give you the necessary miracles), etc. I am merely trying to understand why you chose as you did.

Re: Some random questions

[pythbox]

Alice never felt mate loss, so we didn't directly know what it was like. The power of the turning analogy is that we directly know it works. Maybe it's like mate loss too, but we're not going to find that out without one of us turning vampire and then losing their mate. I'm not sure how well it would work even if we just had somebody send the feeling to us - other people don't feel things the same way we do, and we might not be able to see how it worked well enough.

-Harley

Time Loops and OOC Comment

[daniel_h]

Gem (after she’s started looping),

It looks like your time loop starts in late January. Have you ever decided to do something appropriate to the loops on February 2nd?

---

Alicorn and Kappa, it looks like this thread is very inactive, and I don’t like asking questions here very much when it looks like almost nobody else uses it. Might it be possible to give this a more generic title (to make it clear that non-Effulgence characters like Mial are allowed, and possibly to let other glowfic authors join in) and link to it on the forum? Or maybe just move it to the forum entirely, but I feel like that would lead to the same problems as the Make My Characters Talk To Each Other thread where it’s hard to keep track of what’s been handled.

Re: Time Loops and OOC Comment

[onceandforall]

I've seen the movie. I haven't been bored enough to actually go to Punxsutawney yet.

[daniel_h]

Bar, do you mind when people in the main area conjure food or other things you sell? You obviously don’t mind too much because you take conjured money, but if somebody were to conjure “another one of what I just had” would that bother you?

Also, would it be possible for somebody with conjuration abilities to just pay off everybody’s tab, whether those people were in Milliways or not, assuming they wouldn’t object once they came in? Do you have an estimate of how much that would cost?

[alicornucopia]

I don't mind at all. Although I enjoy being of assistance I do not feel slighted when people make do without my intervention.

I would require them to be specific about what tabs they were paying off and am much too circumspect about disclosing patron information to third parties for them to acquire enough information to pay off all tabs. Certainly the sum would be beyond astronomical.

Island

[timepoof]

(If this is valid:)
A hypothetical stranded!Island whose peal met the incandescent peal, Kithabel and Milan, and all the Bell/Sadde pairings and had another party such that he could observe.

What do you think of the new additions?

Re: Island

[lintamande]

Stranded how? At that point he probably picks up on Bell-accessory-person as a category. And is totally disinterested in being a Bell-accessory person but is happy that they have them. I think he probably has a lot of feelings about didn't-feed-any-planets-into-black-holes Cam and his relationship dynamic with Adana.

There will be light

[daniel_h]

Taliar, as of a few hours before he asks for his second bad day (at this point he's hoping to go at least a month before asking):

I bet you can't go two months without asking for another bad day.

Re: There will be light

[pythbox]

I bet I can't either.

-Taliar

Grimdarda Maitimo

[daniel_h]

Silmaril Peal in general (mostly the Bells, but any others that care to chime in), before Tireh showed up,

You are probably aware that you messed up the meeting with Midnight. There are a number of reasons for this and I’m not trying to assign blame, just stating a painfully obvious fact.

How would you do things differently if you ran into another one now, at around the point when Elspeth landed on Midnight?

Re: Grimdarda Maitimo

[lintamande]

Maitimos except Mitros and Space should have no interaction with future Midnights. Mitros and Space think the best approach is to give him a softer out? Like, land, kill Enemy, give everyone free will and then put them back to normal (present this as standard procedure for this type of Arda because most of the residents have been mentally tampered with and deserve a clean slate), explain that his Valar suck harder than standard Valar and ask about landing subtle artists to undo what they can. Midnight will ask what Ardas with less Valar tampering are like, and can get a timeline/overview that makes it pretty clear standard-timeline Maitimos Don't Do The Thing. If unwilling to give out Loki's spells do not do anything with them or even make it clear they exist. Reembody everyone. ...wait and see what he does? Optimistically maybe he just decides that he was only terrible because of Valar vindictiveness and will stop being terrible out of spite; likely he makes himself very busy getting his population up to modernity; unlikely he runs away while that'd mean losing access to resources needed for aforementioned.

Findekános think this all sounds great but that if once things are settled their alt doesn't leave he should, like, be talked to in order to ensure this isn't for reasons like 'worried that if I leave he'll commit ethnic cleansing out of spite'. If it's for reasons like 'the Maitimo zigzagged really hard and decided he only did any of that in the first place because of the evil Valar and is now being an aggressively good boyfriend as only Maitimos can' then that's fine.

Maitimos other than Space and Mitros continue to think the best handling here involves murder.

Animorphs Nothlit

[daniel_h]

Bella, Andi, Robin, Ethan, and Trouble,

If you had to become a nothlit (trapped in morph; I don’t think you know that word) with one of your current (Earth, non-human) morphs, which would you prefer?



I’m not asking the Silmaril set because they have better morphing technology available.

Re: Animorphs Nothlit

[alicornucopia]

Butterfly would go with Andalite under nonwartime conditions because they have hands and she likes the tail and the eyes. Under wartime conditions pigeon for practicality.

Andi would do pigeon for the being-home sensation or maybe owl to see in the dark and be soft. Unless Bella told her to pick something else, because Bella would have a good reason if she did that.