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

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”?

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

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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)?

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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?

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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?

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

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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?

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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?

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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.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[dark_light]

Yep.

Regarding the brain damage question daemons are often relatively resilient to it in an immediate sense - their brains are not damaged in the same injury, they can retain some faculties that their human has lost. But emotional states are still contagious. If the human is frustrated or psychotic or anxious or something, so is their daemon; contagion is theoretically two-way but if something's leaning on the switch in one brain the other can't fight back effectively.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[self_composed]

It's a very easy mental action both ways. And people can and presumably do use it in those ways. I don't yet have a less drastic option for getting people just plain out of your way implemented.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[she_sells_seashells]

Most of the material was based on reality but the sequences of events and the degree of overlap were wrong.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[jovahs_heiress]

The settlers thought that a civilization that perpetuated the disharmony and violence they had disapproved of in their home was worse than no civilization at all. I not only disagree, I have a better set of tools for preventing any local disharmony from getting out of hand in the first place.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[beheld_beauty]

I can't begin to speculate on her motives there, but it almost certainly wasn't a magical requirement.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[lifes_sake]

I usually don't utter complete sentences, but yeah, once I found out I talked in my sleep I did my best to figure out a way to quit it - once I had coins it was actually only a square.

I think most of them keep it. They're not wizards and some people whose opinions they find relevant think it's cute.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[powershines]

That's a pretty weird hypothetical. Why would I leave a clue in my private notebook and not a note out where she could see it if I wanted her to read it, and if I didn't want her to read it why wouldn't I just bring the notebook to be sure?

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[bellfounding]

Replying for Bells in general on the notebook question: "acceptable" is probably the wrong word to use. Like, would it sometimes lead to outcomes we liked? Yes, if we've been kidnapped or we're sleeping-Kithabel waiting to be kissed, then we want people to have resources to fix these problems for us. Does that mean we want to weaken (at all!) the rules governing notebook-looking? No, not really. From the perspective of a Bell who has not yet noticed how many things happen to us, it's staggeringly unlikely to be useful to have an exception, and people inventing exceptions for themselves are more likely to be against our privacy than in favor of us being rescued from future kidnappings.

Re: Questions for Relatively Major Greens

[thaumobabble]

Freecasting is not amenable to coining.

People-templates are not part of planet-templates. A lot of Earth public figures (not that I've looked at tons, but a few) are sort of... templatey without being templatey. They're following the Earth template the way Bells' parents follow the Bell template; they are not mostly strong templates in their own right. The current ruler of Linderwall is not templatey at all.