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Re: The Chronicles of Quelouva
Posted By: Forrest of B.orgDate: 10/9/17 3:14 p.m.

In Response To: Re: The Chronicles of Quelouva (scratskinner)

: I see it has replaced the bit where he won't talk because he felt his opinion
: was demonstrably unhelpful. I feel that bit ought to be preserved, as it's
: a nice bit of character development. Perhaps you could have someone
: earlier on having worried the freezing thing happened, and being met with
: "No, I ain't frozen solid. Yet. I just don't want to make things
: worse by opening my fool mouth again." It could even be that being
: involved in planetside affairs was helping keep him conscious, and once
: that stopped...

That’s a good idea. I’ll make a note to add something like that, maybe during the end of Pantheon Genesis when the flood is happening and everyone is scrambling to figure out who’s on first while the whole world is ending.

: It occurs to me that someone might wonder why he didn't entrust it to the
: elves, and that there are quite a few reasons not: it was the Elf King's
: idea to hide the Gems in caves, and Tom/Sue aren't supposed to know;

They weren't really hidden in caves on purpose. They were lost in the surf and sand where the sundered continents drifted together when the Fire King and Ice Queen mutually annihilated each other, and that place later became the continental divide of the new, merged continent, the highest mountain ridge down the middle of it all.

: the
: elves are likely to protect the Gem as well as the cave would, that is,
: only up till it's found;

I'm actually unsure what Elves would think about the Gem of Fire, now that I think about it. It seems like, being under the sway of the Gem of Ice, they would be kind of sickened by it, emotionally, like the way we might look at a pile of cocaine: "jeez what a awful thing, who the hell thought making this was a good idea, it ought to be destroyed before it turns someone into some buy-eyed psycho". (I imagine most vampires would look at the Gem of Ice analogously as something like opium).

: he didn't actually know where the elves were
: hanging out;

Tom would definitely know.

: he doesn't have a lead-lined box or whatever to safely
: transport the Gem to the elves, cause it's not like they're going to come
: get it themselves.

That's basically the main reason. Elves can't be arsed to do anything and Tom doesn't want to get near the Gem himself lest he turn him into a vampire. (Not right away, of course, but again it's like a drug, once he's under its influence he would feel like that's a good influence that he should have been under all the time and he should keep getting more exposure to it because it's making him "better" than he used to be).

I should make a note to myself about this drug analogy, I really like this and want to work it into the text eventually.

: It also occurs to me to wonder whether he tried getting some wizard to come
: on an "innocent" hike with him, thus framing it as a harmless
: diversion rather than a perilous enterprise that might not be worth their
: effort, and shoving their hands onto the Gem at the first opportunity.
: (Why would he need an expedition, after all?)

It's way too far a trip for that. That's like you live in Louisiana and say "hey buddy wanna join me on a hike up to Idaho?", or you live in Paris and say "hey wanna join me on a hike to Moscow?" It's a half continent away, uphill, through the wilderness. Not a day hike.

: That's a good save. And even Tom in full possession of his memories wouldn't
: have known that her crazy had already survived multiple suicides.

Thanks :) FWIW the "superbeing" thing is not something I just made up now to solve this problem, but something that's been planned for ages. Long before the story was in its current form, I had had it that the original beings in the world were "Giants" with all the powers and none of the weaknesses of Elves and Vampires, and the offspring of the Vampire Queen and Elf King, before the Queen of Hell was a thing at all much less identified with Metis, was just "the Giantess" (later "Sphidi"), who was evil for no particular reason other than that she was powerful and could get away with it.

: Come to think of it, given that the ice/fire goddesses thought to have
: safeguards in their gems against someone using their own power against
: them, seems a bit odd they went the whole "yes this will make you a
: superbeing" route. Of course, perhaps they were counting on her
: losing her memory to rebirth, and hence her knowledge of the Sword of
: Darklight and how to get back at them. And the Gems, apparently, safeguard
: only against their own type... how active are the goddesses in mortal
: affairs? It would be ironic, and a nice hint of the limits on their
: foresight, if one or both of them'd been overthrown (by the bearer of the
: opposing gem) long before the Queen of Hell took aim at their respective
: houses.

I had actually been thinking about some stuff along these lines the day before you posted this. I was thinking about what Fire and Ice's motives would be in setting up this whole scenario, and coming up with ideas along the lines of how in the old Virtuality before the fall, they were simultaneously enemies and allies: enemies in hell, and allies in heaven. So I was thinking that maybe the idea was that the Gems would exaggerate their respective qualities in the people under their influence, but those qualities have both a light and a dark side, and so long as people turned to the dark sides of those qualities the vampires and elves would be enemies and would be weak against the qualities of the other; but if somehow people could turn to the light sides, and come together in love, then there would be born a new people (at least, starting with one person) with all the strengths of both and none of the weaknesses, as the goddesses had sought to foster in the old heaven, but more literal and less metaphorical.

I don't really have a good reason why the Queen of Hell would be that reborn superperson, though. Maybe I should add something about how the intended process (a true reconciliation between vampires and elves) would be meant to somehow redeem the Queen. Maybe the Eldest was trapped like that so that only the redeemed and reborn Queen could come to free him and they could live happily ever after. The goddesses were intending to inflict tough love on the world: "get your shit together and live happily ever after, or die over and over and over again trying until you get it right". But because Vis forced things and just raped the Elf-King instead, that broke whatever was supposed to happen and ruined everything for everyone.

I still need to figure out what exactly was supposed to happen instead, though.

: I think there's a jumble of questions I'm asking here.

: One part: Tom and Sue are pretty famous, right? How often do people show up
: saying they think they are the next incarnation? (It's not like that kind
: of thing is unheard of in the real world..) And how much is known about
: them, and how was it discovered? (If Tom'd had a diary or anything, he
: would have directed his followers to that, not to Sue.) How many facts of
: Tom or Sue's life would you need to get right before the Church could not
: prove you were not Tom or Sue?

: another part is: How does the Church distinguish fact from fiction when
: analyzing dreams? How much do they have to rely on secondhand accounts,
: and how reliable are these accounts? When there's a contradiction between
: what is recorded and what someone has dreamed, how is it resolved? do they
: correct the historical record or decide the dreamer is not who they
: thought? (in either sense)

: And another: How are dream analyses carried out? Are they simple "tell
: me about your dreams" affairs? is there hypnosis involved? or do they
: have a doohickey to hook up to your brain and copy'n'paste? that last
: precludes someone just making up their dreams to match what they want the
: analyst to believe. You'd need the doohickey operator(s) to be colluding
: in your deception.

The process I had in mind was that, once John was informed by Tom that dreams are actually memories, the Church just started compiling records of people's dreams and cross-referencing them and trying to extract information about the past from those. It's a highly fallible process because people can lie and misremember and dreams are just fragmented bits and pieces of many lives to begin with, so the image that the Church has of the past is about as accurate as our records of what happened with the Pantheon are (e.g. we have that Oron was "castrated" by Kron, who "swallowed" his kids besides Xio, who was raised by "wolves", and "swallowed" Met, and then Aten "burst forth from his head fully-formed", etc).

I was imagining that they only know of Tom and Sue what the many random people who had met them over their long lives knew about them, and that they just got Murdock and his sister to narrate their dreams and compared those with the information they have about Tom and Sue that way. But you raise a good question about how they can tell that they're not just faking it, not just recounting the public doctrine about Tom and Sue, and I don't have a good answer for that yet. Since there is magic in the setting, and wizards are involved in the church, it is reasonable that maybe some kind of mind-magic could verify that the things people claim to see in their dreams are what they actually see, which seems like it would solve the problem.

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The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 8/24/17 10:00 p.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaGeneral-RADIX 8/25/17 4:53 a.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaGeneral-RADIX 8/25/17 10:26 a.m.
           Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 8/25/17 11:06 a.m.
                 Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaGeneral-RADIX 8/25/17 11:31 a.m.
                       Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 8/25/17 11:37 a.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvascratskinner 8/25/17 8:45 p.m.
           Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 8/25/17 9:47 p.m.
                 Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvascratskinner 8/25/17 10:53 p.m.
                       Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 8/25/17 11:36 p.m.
                             Re: The Chronicles of Quelouva — MMOSsCan-ned Food 8/26/17 7:40 p.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaGeneral-RADIX 8/26/17 5:10 p.m.
           Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 8/27/17 8:01 a.m.
                 Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvascratskinner 8/27/17 1:13 p.m.
                       Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 8/27/17 6:22 p.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaCan-ned Food 8/26/17 6:36 p.m.
     Nurbal Colony: Part 1Forrest of B.org 9/6/17 9:45 p.m.
           Re: Nurbal Colony: Part 1Forrest of B.org 9/7/17 8:28 p.m.
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                       Re: Nurbal Colony: Part 1Forrest of B.org 9/7/17 9:50 p.m.
                             Re: Nurbal ColonyCan-ned Food 9/8/17 1:42 p.m.
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                                         Re: Nurbal ColonyForrest of B.org 9/18/17 1:26 p.m.
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                       Re: Nurbal Colony: Part 3VikingBoyBilly 9/9/17 7:52 a.m.
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                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Re: Eternal stuffVikingBoyBilly 11/22/17 1:46 p.m.
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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Re: Eternal stuffnevets01 11/25/17 4:37 a.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Re: Eternal stuffPerseusSpartacus 11/25/17 10:14 a.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Re: Eternal stuffForrest of B.org 11/26/17 9:25 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Re: Eternal stuffGeneral-RADIX 11/26/17 10:21 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                         Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 2scratskinner 11/18/17 3:39 a.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                               Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 2Forrest of B.org 11/20/17 10:33 a.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                                     Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 2 3cscratskinner 11/22/17 7:20 a.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                                           Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 2 3cForrest of B.org 11/22/17 9:54 a.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                   Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 2General-RADIX 11/18/17 6:37 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                         Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 2Forrest of B.org 11/20/17 10:40 a.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                               Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 2General-RADIX 11/20/17 1:51 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                 Virtuality Immanent: Part 3Forrest of B.org 11/16/17 9:57 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                       Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 3scratskinner 11/17/17 12:38 a.m.
                                                                                                                                                                       Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 3General-RADIX 11/17/17 7:15 a.m.
                                                                                                                                                                       Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 3VikingBoyBilly 11/17/17 12:35 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                             Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 3Forrest of B.org 11/17/17 3:23 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                   Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 3VikingBoyBilly 11/17/17 6:06 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                                         Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 3Forrest of B.org 11/17/17 10:05 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                       Re: Virtuality Immanent: Part 3nevets01 11/17/17 12:46 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                       The Chronicles of Quelouva are DONE! (ish)Forrest of B.org 12/29/17 8:31 p.m.
                                                                                                                                                                             Re: The Chronicles of Quelouva are DONE! (ish)General-RADIX 12/30/17 1:47 a.m.
     some random thoughtsscratskinner 9/9/17 12:29 a.m.
           Re: some random thoughtsForrest of B.org 9/9/17 8:40 a.m.
                 Re: some random thoughtsscratskinner 9/10/17 2:19 a.m.
                       Re: some random thoughtsForrest of B.org 9/11/17 9:35 a.m.
                             Re: some random thoughtsscratskinner 9/12/17 5:14 p.m.
                                   Re: some random thoughtsForrest of B.org 9/12/17 6:24 p.m.
                                         Re: some random thoughtsscratskinner 9/14/17 7:53 p.m.
                                               Re: some random thoughtsForrest of B.org 9/14/17 10:13 p.m.
                                                     Re: some random thoughtsscratskinner 9/16/17 11:01 a.m.
                                                           Re: some random thoughtsForrest of B.org 9/16/17 2:56 p.m.
                                                                 Re: some random thoughtsscratskinner 9/17/17 12:13 p.m.
                                                                       Re: some random thoughtsForrest of B.org 9/18/17 8:10 a.m.
                             Re: some random thoughts 2bscratskinner 9/16/17 9:12 a.m.
                                   Re: some random thoughts 2bForrest of B.org 9/16/17 2:58 p.m.
                                         Re: some random thoughts 2bscratskinner 9/17/17 12:31 p.m.
                                               Re: some random thoughts 2bForrest of B.org 9/18/17 7:41 a.m.
           Re: some random thoughtsForrest of B.org 9/11/17 3:37 p.m.
           Re: some random thoughtsForrest of B.org 9/14/17 1:55 p.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaGeneral-RADIX 9/11/17 8:02 p.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 9/28/17 9:43 p.m.
           Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvascratskinner 9/30/17 1:11 a.m.
                 Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 10/2/17 9:56 a.m.
                       Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvascratskinner 10/7/17 12:53 p.m.
                             Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 10/9/17 3:14 p.m.
                                   Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvascratskinner 10/17/17 6:38 p.m.
                                         Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 10/17/17 8:23 p.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaTycho 10/22/17 4:14 p.m.
           Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvanevets01 10/23/17 7:42 a.m.
           Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 10/23/17 10:41 a.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 10/26/17 10:49 p.m.
           Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvascratskinner 10/27/17 1:34 a.m.
                 Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 10/27/17 8:32 a.m.
     Re: Virtuality Transcendent: Part 3 *MOVED*scratskinner 11/9/17 10:50 p.m.
           Re: Virtuality Transcendent: Part 3 *MOVED*Forrest of B.org 11/10/17 8:39 a.m.
                 Re: Virtuality Transcendent: Part 3 *MOVED*scratskinner 12/21/17 12:48 p.m.
                       noticed you've updated while doing some factchecksscratskinner 12/21/17 2:26 p.m.
                       Re: Virtuality Transcendent: Part 3 *MOVED*Forrest of B.org 12/21/17 3:48 p.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 11/22/17 12:18 p.m.
           Future Perfect expandedForrest of B.org 11/29/17 10:00 p.m.
     Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 12/7/17 9:30 a.m.
           Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaGeneral-RADIX 12/7/17 9:43 a.m.
                 Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 12/7/17 10:24 a.m.
                       Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvascratskinner 12/8/17 7:22 p.m.
                             Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 12/9/17 8:19 a.m.
                                   Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 12/13/17 9:10 a.m.
                                         Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaGeneral-RADIX 12/13/17 3:18 p.m.
                                         Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaYossarian 12/15/17 9:58 p.m.
                                         Re: The Chronicles of Quelouvascratskinner 12/16/17 1:22 p.m.
                                               Re: The Chronicles of QuelouvaForrest of B.org 12/18/17 12:56 p.m.

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