belltower | Talk To Glowfic Characters

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

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.

Edited (Slightly change letter to Glass about Golden) Date: 2015-08-29 07:16 am (UTC)

From:

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

From:

thisvorlunatic

Okay, I'll give this a shot...

Imagine that you are, somehow, a mint who can make high-level coins out of mild boredom or some other trivially inconvenient state of mind. You are set for miracles. Never will you be in danger of having less magic than you need.

Now, think of someone you know who is just incredibly, loathsomely annoying. If you don't know such a person, imagine one. The sort of person where just knowing you're going to have to interact with them in any capacity drains all the fun out of your day.

Suppose that this person is part of a smallish minority population who can - let's see, you're human, right - who can fly by flapping their elbows. Out of all those people, it's the annoying one specifically who is also graced with the ability to distribute this power.

Now, you're capable of assigning yourself any flight power you like with miracle magic - dozens of them, if you choose - you could shapeshift into a hundred different kinds of flying animal, you could give yourself levitation, you could spontaneously manifest jetpacks at need, you could invent those amazing-sounding wings my alt Sable found in her adventures. You are replete with potential flight powers.

But the specific power of flight by elbow-flapping can only be acquired by going to the Most Annoying Person in the World and asking politely, then enduring their thinly veiled contempt while they put on a show of welcoming you to the community of elbow-flappers, whereupon for at least a decade afterward they will be contacting you regularly to remind you how great it is to be an elbow-flapper, sigh loudly, and rhetorically ask what took you so long in a sanctimoniously pitying tone.

I hope this metaphor has been enlightening.

From:

daniel_h

Yeah, that does make a lot more sense. You aren't just beating Draconic, you're also beating all the lizards who believe it. I can see why the minor additional ability of flight-in-natural-form-by-wingflapping wouldn’t be enough to put up with the Dragon Council or individual dragons when you also have the ability to fly with shapeshifting, wizardry, and/or tools even before you became a mint. Do I understand that correctly?

From:

thisvorlunatic

Yeah, I think you've got it. Glad I could clear that up.

From:

daniel_h

Having thought about it some more since my last reply, I have a minor comment about this and two further questions.

First, the comment. Most of the metaphor was quite useful, but there is one thing that has been bugging me. I would be so bad at minting if coins were made out of boredom. As soon as I made a coin I would stop being bored because I had magic. This would eventually wear off, but it couldn't do it quickly because that would require me to get used to having coins, which I couldn't do while generating them so slowly.

Now, for the first question. Suppose that, before becoming a mint yourself, you heard that Lazarus had made a bunch of unusuals and uniques. I imagine that when he came by to unshren you and Finnah, you would have asked about that; you've said several times that you wanted more form choices. From my understanding of the magic involved, it would be impossible to have an unusual or unique shren; given the choice between "unique dragon" and "shren", which would you have chosen? I suppose Lazarus could also have offered you a shapeshifting power unrelated to your species, but for all I know such a power would have weird interactions with your existing forms. You could probably have designed a suitable power yourself eventually, but at this point you didn't know you'd become a mint and Lazarus was busy curing all the other shrens.

Finally, Lazarus did not give any of the baby shrens a choice about whether to become dragons or not, and given the circumstances this was probably the right choice (even if you would trust 20-year-old dragonishes with such a big question, speed was probably more important in this case). Suppose that for some reason you were given the choice of turning into a dragon or not when you were partly through a 20-year course of esu. Would your answer have been different in that case?

From:

thisvorlunatic

Re: the comment, yeah, I anticipated something like that, which is why I added "or some other trivially inconvenient state of mind".

Interestingly enough, I'd have to double-check with Lazarus but from my current understanding of the theory involved it is possible to have a unique shren, the same way you get a shren parunia.

Given I'd be, one, a baby, and two, partly through a 20-year course of esu... I'd say it depends. If it was after I invented the word e'sisaak but before things got really bad, I bet I'd be stubborn. If it was while things were in the middle of getting really bad, it would depend what mood they caught me in. If it was after things had definitely gotten really bad, I'd probably stick it out just because I was constantly living in the victory-at-any-cost state of mind at that point.

But if I did decide to give up shrenhood as a baby, it would probably take me only a few more decades to figure out that I regretted it. Whether or not I'd regret it enough to change back... I really couldn't say.

From:

cross_and_bow

Oh, I suppose they're all right if you like that sort of thing.

From:

taste_tester

I hope you wouldn't believe me if I said I'd never tried. My power is just one of the non-extensible ones, it's a real tragedy. I tried so hard.

Joham gets around a lot. I'd picked up some power that let me accompany him unnoticed, so I thought I'd see where he got around to.

From:

daniel_h

Ah, I guess that makes sense about your power. I was thinking it might be along the lines of you trying a whole bunch of new powers when you turned, and you not getting around to trying to extend your own until it had already started to set. What sort of variance is there in extensibily of powers when they’re new, and in how much they settle over time?

From:

taste_tester

Lots. Some people have almost no wiggle room, from day one. (I sometimes turn potential witches whose talents as humans are non-magical myself, so I know this.) Some people like Elspeth are extensibility prodigies. How fast they settle also vary - it seems to matter how often you use it (more is better), and how you feel about its associated personality trait (the broader the principle and the more central to the personality, the better), but obviously that isn't the only factor.