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

[self_composed]

Coins are bad at information, but they're not bad at giving us tools to get ahold of it. A much bigger problem is navigating information-collection ethically - pastwatching people who consent to be watched or were at least in public places, avoiding mindreading except of particularly agreeable targets, that sort of thing.

We actually can't conjure written material that nobody wrote. Those textbooks had been produced in the past, they were just very hard to get ordinary printed copies of in modern-day Sunshine. Coins can pull books - and other media, for that matter - from much farther away than it seems like they ought to be able to, out of the past or even other worlds. But they can't write it themselves. They can write down well-defined or person-guided information like the contents of party nametags, and I can get them to do some Markov-chain-like writing based on samples if I ever have a reason to do that, but they won't produce textbooks de novo.

The superest Lazarus powers we're likely to find are probably those of his Gift alt, but we're leaving him alone for the time being. We certainly can't wish for better magic-seeing powers than Lazarus or the Gift version of same have - how have you heard this much about how our magic works without hearing that ingot powers always beat similar wished ones, as a hard limit? Even Glass's aura-based version isn't better than the ingot kind.

We can teleport to all kinds of targets, but we'd have to define "knows the most" to use it as a parameter. Insofar as we don't even know what there is to know, let alone how to compare things like practical versus factual versus theoretical knowledge, it's not well-defined. Insofar as we do know what there is to know, this solution has limited value.

I do plan to get old Elias himself out of Downside one of these days, though, and he might be able to give me something to go on.

[linkhyrule5]

Ethics I definitely get, but that's often not relevant for undiscovered magic.

Huh, that's mildly surprising about textbooks but not overly so, fits in with "like programs, not good at information." Still, if anyone ever knew how wishcoins worked and wrote it down, something like that would get it for you. It's a shame, though - otherwise you could revolutionize education just by producing vaguely competent textbooks on demand. (Seems like "competence" could be disassembled, though, so maybe there's still hope for finding the most competently-written of existing candidates and enshrining it as canon?)

Somehow, I never actually made the connection between "Defensive/offensive ingots trump O/D mints" and "O/D ingots trump O/D mints", which is something of a derpfail on my part. ... I wonder if you could get around that by changing the parameters slightly - but no, ingots likely represent "the limit of what wishes can do", not "you shall not pass because this power was already taken."

... Can you wish for someone to be an ingot?

Would "Accomplished the most", "Cast the most spells/minted the most coins", "Possesses the greatest quantity (in bits) of unique knowledge" be specific enough? Similar measures of performance that might lead you to a mage (of whatever type, not just Aurora's) more experienced than you? They have obvious failure modes but don't seem completely wrongheaded, and - well, learning more about the theory of magic seems to be more of a priority to counterfactual-Emperor-Me that it does to the peal.

(And on a completely random note, how do you use HTML in comments? Can you?)

[self_composed]

Considering how my early experiments in discovering magic went, ethics in who I'd want supervising might be more relevant than you're imagining...

As far as I can tell, there has never been more complete written information on coins than what I found when I fell into Elias's hidey-hole.

You cannot wish for someone to be an ingot, although it does look like if you make enough coins, you get ingot kids (c.f. Helen, Yseult, Kerron, and Aedyt, results on Céleste/Hyacinthe/Keziah/Ariel/Peninnah pending).

I'm not sure coins are capable of measuring information in bits, but it's worth a try. "Cast the most spells" could also lead to reasonable avenues of investigation, except that I'm pretty sure by this point Bells have outstripped our predecessors along that kind of axis in most magic systems we've gotten ahold of. Maybe not Aurora's or some of Glass's several kinds?

Don't get me wrong, we like learning about magic, but there are urgent things going on. People are continuing to be dead and nobody has asked them all if that is okay with them. As long as I can lean on my magic to fix that and other problems, the fiddly details can be put off. I am immortal, after all, there's no worry I'll never get the chance ever if I don't do it now.

You can use HTML in comments just fine. Ordinary angle brackets, ordinary tags.

[linkhyrule5]

Well, yes. In the original (and apparently counterfactual) case where you were wishing up a nonexistent textbook, though, the question wouldn't come up.

Shame about ingots, but then I suppose that would be a really easy loophole to the "can't trump ingots" rule.

Eh, you could always tack on "that's not a known Bell." (Ooh, ooh, does Merlin exist anywhere? I wouldn't expect King Arthur in Downside even if he did, but Merlin often outright dies! ... it is strange to be excited about that.)

Yeah, but counterfactual-Emperor-Me is worried about nasty but subtle/invisible side effects, which are nice to catch early. Particularly since "side effects of already-cast magic" is on the shortlist of "things that could kill me in theory." (Also, it seems like it would be really nice to just, say, walk into Alethia and know how to cast any possible spell in a few days or something. Less fun, sure, but for important stuff I don't think you care.)

Obvious enough, should've just tried that. *derp*

[self_composed]

We haven't actually checked for any Merlins. I'm not sure the name is enough to go on, since certainly at least some people have just named their children that, and the legend might be too much to go on if he existed but has been massively distorted. (I mean, Aurum and Sunshine have really similar sets of available books and movies about vampires. And so do worlds with no vampires at all. There might be a dozen Merlins close enough to count who bear no real resemblance to one another.)

We're relying on Lazarus (and Glass) to warn us about anything nasty lying in wait. Glass, and the admin, are both really very sure that torching works really very well, so we aren't that worried about being perma-killed (although certainly there's unpleasantness we'd like to avoid). Possible exception being in Materia, but Glass would bet on torching even without Aether's aura.

[linkhyrule5]

Point, that's a shame. (Though if you do check, check for Myrddin, it's more likely to work.) It was kind of an idle thought but I miiight be a Merlin fan. :P

But you're probably right, that sort of thing generally gets caught by natives or Lazarus/Glass or both. (Though it's easy to imagine a magic system that would get around that - if there's a nasty way to exploit someone's spellcasting from afar, I'm not sure it'd be obvious in the target.) Counterfactual-Me is just significantly more paranoid about subtle mean magic.

[modrony]

Can't the learning happen in accelerated time? I fail to see what urgency means when you can just make time.
Why haven't you paused the time in non-belled worlds?(Get someone to emigrate though a door)
There is suffering happening every second in those and you dont have the resources to tackle them yet but presumably will.

[edgeofyourseat]

The Milliways time-pausing thing doesn't always work.

[modrony]

If it works sometimes it's still net positive with very little cost.

[pythbox]

How do you figure? First you'd have to find somebody willing to move out, then you'd have to unhook the target world from Jane. So if the pause blows up, you could lose a lot more time than you would've if you'd just left it alone.

Or did you mean no-Jane worlds? You'd lose the time it'd take you to find somebody in Milliways willing to move out of theirs, and I bet it'd be a lot.

-War

[modrony]

You got a point there. Though I do wonder if Jane-time is adjustible by taking Jane-device to speeded or slowed time. Not a good thing to experiment on granted. Did something like that happen when she lived in Aegis?

Could Shell Bell force a door to no-Jane worlds? In that case you could look for a volunteer in the target world instead. Bigger sample size and no waiting. I'd volunteer but I bet my world is Jane-able since we have internet.

[she_sells_seashells]

In theory, we could dilate time around Janepoints such that Jane synced her point to - Bell Standard Time, let's go with that - and the rest of the world followed along at a fraction of that rate, but we don't actually know how Jane's time syncing works, and if it breaks we have bigger problems than a few months going by in worlds we haven't begun to handle yet. This also wouldn't let Jane use the Internets on worlds that have them, though that's a relatively more minor concern.

People seem to have inflated ideas about what my aura can do. I can get a door from a world to Milliways whenever I want. I can get Milliways to let me door out to any world I've been to before without spending a coin to force it. And I can sometimes get a door to a world I haven't visited before, but I need something to go on. I didn't get a door to Materia. I did get a door to Rainbow, but only when I had someone on hand who had met someone from Rainbow. I can't just door to unspecified Janeless worlds.

[modrony]

What is your stance on intentional Bell duplication (possibly with duplicate significant others so they wont be lonely)

That might be another answer to the empress shortage problem.
I think I'd do this even with no alternate dimensions to look after just so one me can look after earth and others can boldly go and seek new life and new civilizations to improve in my own dimension.

It is nice to be unique but is it more nice than knowing multiple civilizations are looked after instead of one?
Is there another reason I am missing? Bellish privacy concerns?

Guess ambiguous power structure would be a problem, but I think me's would struggle more about who has to be the boss than who gets to.

Does downside catch non-human sentient life?
If it does and there is'nt any it's obviously ok to stay earth-centric.
(but it is weird if this is the case, and I'd still wonder about downside definition of sentient)

[ending_of]

Downside catches everything.

[jalapeno_dude]

Well, that's an ambiguous answer if I've ever heard one (and technically wrong, too, since Downside doesn't catch things on Syntropy).

Stella/Golden/Pattern (plus others, I guess, but you guys seem like the most likely), you did check for other sentient life in the universe, right? Given your general utilitarian motives, it seems like it wouldn't make sense to devote nearly as much time to fine-tuning Earth and humanity if there are much bigger net welfare gains to be had elsewhere first. This seems especially important now that you know they definitely exist in Syntropy.

[ending_of]

I answered in the same context implied by the question. Downside catches everything - human and otherwise, sentient and otherwise, living and otherwise - from all worlds that funnel to it.

[jalapeno_dude]

Ooh, interesting. So if something was never alive, how does Downside decide at what point in its--er, unlife--to "catch" it? That is, Downside seems to catch things at a particular moment in their history, which for humans at least corresponds to (the first?) time that they die. But if Downside also catches things that were never alive, at what particular moment in their history does it catch them?

[ending_of]

Nonliving things are retrievable from any point in their history, with potential duplication. I could fill the sky with copies of some world's Earth from every moment in its history up until the present, if I chose to. Nonlife is distinct from life in that way; relatedly, nonlife also cannot torch.

There is some automatic retrieval of nonliving things, which takes them from the moment that they are destroyed, for any obvious definition of 'destroyed'. Since duplication is not a concern, the same object may appear several times: for example, a mug in some living world might shatter, generating a copy from just before the break; then it might be repaired, and later broken again, generating a second copy from just before the second break.

[modrony]

Can bacteria be made torchable?
What about plants/insects?

[ending_of]

Unaware life of any kind cannot currently be made torchable. If I chose, I could change that. I do not so choose.

[bellfounding]

Yes, we checked for aliens. We don't have 'em. Seems they don't come by default, and the worlds that have them don't have any of the same kinds.

[she_sells_seashells]

Permanent duplication doesn't appeal to us. It's okay as a temporary problem-solving measure, but we don't want to stay that way, even with duplicate partners.