I was under the impression that we are using our translation gimmick, but it is speaking in a language we already have encountered so there was no adjustment time.
It would be nice to think so.
Melia can't imagine that happening. Her elementals love her and the feeling is mutual; if it would upset Melia, and reckless destruction definitely would, they quickly learn not to do it.
If the emotional bond is that strong and keeping them in check is that easy, then that is unexpected good news. You can understand why one would be concerned, though, since they
do show a penchant for small-c chaos.
...
ON MELIA'S ABILITY TO KEEP HERSELF SAFE, AND ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS
Would that even work through the portal, though? Seems likely to me that most magical effects wouldn't usually be able to cross the barrier between worlds.
Since this is only the second portal we've observed and we lack the magical knowledge to understand the portals very well... I think this might be an unwarranted assumption. Even so, though...
And maybe all the other options are illusory, too. I dunno, I feel like we probably shouldn't assume everything we see is an illusion on minor pieces of evidence. Especially because I don't think an illusion would be able to adapt to us when we aren't even there. Depends on how magic works, though. Unless I miss my guess, most illusions would be like programs, made reacting to outside stimuli. Especially in the case very long-term ones, you'd want an 'inactive' mode, to conserve power.
None of the other scenes show us anything
abnormal. The marketplace looks like a normal marketplace. The road looks like a normal road. The tower is an exceptionally large building and the explosions are unusual, but they're within the bounds of things that Melia has some frame of reference for evaluation.
We can make reasonable inferences about all three scenes, based on using our intuition to fill in the gaps in our explicit knowledge about what's going on. For instance, we can reasonably infer that the presence of water elementals means other kinds of elementals exist. We can reasonably infer that the existence of marketplaces implies the existence of trade caravans, merchants, currency, and the other paraphernalia associated with marketplaces. We COULD be wrong about these inferences, but they are reasonably likely to be correct.
Nearly everything about the 'pool of blood' scene is unusual or uncanny. That doesn't mean it's
bad, but it does mean paying extra scrutiny. We cannot assume that any specific detail of the 'pool of blood' scene means what we think it means,
without cross-referencing it against other details of the situation, because we don't have a wealth of prior experience with other similar glowy blood pools that have unseen voices singing in the middle of them. Since the area is rich in magic, illusions and other exotic magical effects are a distinct possibility that should be taken seriously.
...
As to "why would the illusion always be on?" ... A spatial rift might very well trigger the tripwire for "switch the illusion back on." A spell that creates a chemical substance that lulls the sniffer into a sense of familiarity might not
strictly be an illusion either, but could have similar triggers, and would pass through portals just fine since it's wafted on the air. An illusionary voice could be generated in the middle of the air as though by a magical 'speaker' device, and would then project through portals just fine because it's just sound waves.
Also, why in the world would you make an illusion that would drive off the target completely, if not for one or two minor details? That seems rather self-defeating.
Perhaps the lake of blood is not an illusion, but the "reassuringly familiar smell" and "charmingly naive/dorky singer"
are illusions? Or, to clarify, sensory stimuli generated by magic in an attempt to lull the unwary into a false sense of security, or at least of reduced
in-security?
It means we won't freak out, even if we see something horrifying. I call that quite an advantage, in not screwing up negotiations. Especially if this is maybe something like Koh the Facestealer expy, or something else that is linked to fear.
Okay, but it doesn't do anything to turn an entity with hostile designs on us into an entity with friendly designs on us. Which is my underlying concern- that this very much looks like the kind of place where malign entities are likely to hang out.
We'd be stepping into what is probably a high-power, high-strangeness environment. Inhabitants of this environment are likely to be powerful and strange.
Our reaction to
them is important, but not nearly as important as
their reaction to
us, which is largely outside our control.
...Except that our talent's power has bugger all to do with any of that. Our elementals don't really care. It has everything to do with exposing our ELEMENTALS to high concentrations of mana. That's how they grow. As far as I'm concerned, the stuff we absorb is a bonus, not the goal. If we have a posse of powerful elementals, we'll be quite a bit safer.
If the elementals showed more signs of being, for lack of a better term, mature, I would worry less. However, as it stands they are very simple creatures, and likely to miss a lot of threats. Plus, I don't think we can assume they're going to rapidly grow powerful enough just from soaking up ambient magic to challenge the natives of the place they're soaking up the magic from. Something native to that place will have already absorbed plenty of environmental magic of their own, after all.
It's like, Melia's knowledge and the combined power of the Melia-elemental team
multiply to determine Melia's power to keep herself safe. An entirely ignorant Melia is much, much less safe than a somewhat more educated Melia, regardless of how powerful her guardians are.
So we last a couple days. I'm fairly confident we can manage it.
That depends heavily on us throwing ourselves on the mercy of unknown and powerful entities, who may not adhere to any particularly civilized set of rules or values.
ON MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS
I dunno, one, maybe two? It depends pretty heavily on how much of boost the elementals get. We need them combat-capable ASAP. We probably aren't going to be lucky enough to get safe options every jump.
Percentage chance of Bad End? Depends on the level of the reward, honestly. I'd guess...I dunno, no higher than 20%, at the extreme far end, for incredible power? I'll do everything I can to skew the odds in our favor, too. For this? I dunno, less than 10%?
I should note you specified 'Bad End', and not 'harm'. Harm I can probably live with, so long as we live. Harm can be fixed and minimized. And expecting none, given that I suspect most of the worlds we visit are going to be about as hospitable as our home plane, is probably a poor assessment. Though, again, I'll do what I can to minimize harm.
Okay, so I'm going to eyeball your "acceptable overall risk of coming to a bad end while powering up Melia" as, oh, 10% ? And you would be willing to take risks like this, say, twice?
If so, any situation with more than a 5% chance of coming to a bad end should probably be avoided.
As to your remark that "The problem is that we can't calculate those odds. At all..." Well, the point is, it's a guideline. Imagine if I believed you were comfortable taking a 50% risk of coming to a bad end, three times in a row, to power up Melia (and/or her elementals). That would tell me a lot about how to interpret your advice. Namely, that if we follow it, we could well end up committed to a course of action that leaves us with only a 12.5% chance of avoiding a bad end.
Now, obviously we don't KNOW in advance what the exact odds of a bad end are just from glancing casually at a situation. But we can estimate. Some situations are obviously very dangerous. Some are obviously moderately dangerous. Some appear to be entirely non-dangerous and we can assign to them a minimal level of "background radiation" danger.
Looking at the 'pool of blood' scenario, I can easily think of a lot of scenarios in which Melia goes there and comes to a bad end. I can imagine plenty of outcomes that go well, or at least not-very-badly. But I can't honestly say to myself "the odds of a bad end in this situation are less than 5%."
That's tantamount to saying "Twenty Melia's, all of them no more equipped than she is now, could go to twenty places this dangerous-looking, and we would expect only about one of them to come to a bad end."
I'm not so optimistic. I look at this situation and imagine that of our sample size of twenty Melias in comparably dangerous/strange/eldritch situations, two or three of them might well come to a bad end.
And if you think two or three of the Melias would likely come to a bad end, out of a sample size of twenty... maybe you should reconsider whether this is a "safe enough" course of action. On the other hand, if you think zero or
at most one of the Melias would come to a bad end, then you have made a decision that is consistent with a well-developed understanding of statistics. Which is praiseworthy; many people can't do that.
ON RISK-TAKING BEHAVIOR
*Deep breath*
Please be careful bringing up Calypso. And please be careful making assumptions about what we were thinking at the time. Because I, at least, was aware it might go wrong the entire time. But I didn't think it could go Bad End wrong (which I was actually kinda wrong about, due to certain things I had forgotten about, and have apologized for the whole thing).
See, I'm not saying
YOU thought the thing with investigating an ancient temple (which had the Goddess of Obnoxious Mind Control lurking within, it turned out) could not possibly go wrong. I freely acknowledge that you were aware there were potential risks. What I'm saying is, I suspect a mindset of
systematically underestimating risks, or ignoring that "risk" means "horrible things could for serious actually happen," played into the Calypso Incident.
In short, people thought 'oooh, a reward!' and simply discounted the existence of the risks, or thought of them as an exciting adventure rather than as a potential way for something to go horribly wrong.
...
Thing is... any risk that can lead to severe personal harm CAN lead to a bad end. Anything with the power to hurt you physically has the power to kill you, unless you have some kind of weird contrivance like a hit point bar. Anything with the power to manipulate your mind has the power to (potentially) manipulate you into a situation you turn out to be unable or unwilling to escape. And unlike Jade, Melia doesn't have an instant "escape button" to get away from a situation where someone is hurting her, since she has to use her own limited magical skills to saw through her 'tether' magic... And she doesn't have full control or understanding of how the tether works or how to saw through it in different magical environments.
It's like, you're a diver with amazing natural buoyancy, so by nature you rapidly float back up to the surface where rescuers are waiting. But your buoyancy makes it hard for you to explore the bottom of anything. So you jump into a body of water with a rope tying your ankle to a big rock. Now, the rope will automatically release long before your air supply runs out- no problem there! However, you cannot leave the bottom of the body of water
early unless you take out your utility knife and cut the rope.
In such a situation, you do NOT go jumping into shark-infested waters. Because if a shark notices you, you have no guarantee of being able to cut the rope around your ankle in less time than it takes the sharks to decide you look tasty.
A ton of things. The question is 'will they end the quest', and, more importantly, 'will all of the participants be alive at the end of the day'? Pretty sure the answers are 'pretty unlikely, unless we act dumb' and 'almost certainly yes'.
I know people get attached to protagonists and take things too seriously on here, but have some perspective, please. No one's life is actually depending on our actions. This is a game on the internet. We are here to have fun.
See, yes, we are, but...
Put this way. Everyone who plays driving sims plays them for fun. But there are two different approaches to playing a driving sim.
One is to drive the car and do one's best to avoid collisions. This is done because failure is usually un-fun, and because some people don't enjoy the experience of vicariously watching a simulated character take unnecessary risks. They want
experiences, not risks. And the kind of experiences you get from high-risk behavior aren't inherently that much more fun (to these people) than the kind you get from low-risk behavior.
I am a person of this type.
In extreme cases, the other kind of person will drive the car off cliffs to watch it fly through the air and explode, or drive on the wrong side of the road. In less extreme cases, they 'merely' do things like try to jump over obstacles a la Evel Kneivel,
because they can within the game environment. In other words, they will go out of their way to do things that would get a real person killed or arrested or crippled. Because they're in an environment where risk-taking behavior just means reloading your saved game,
at worst.
I am not a person of this type.
In general, when playing games of any type I pursue strategies calculated in terms of perceived likelihood of 'success,' where survival is a major element of 'success.'
Therefore, I don't see a lot of value in the argument that "well, if the character dies it's not like anyone dies in real life." I totally get that, but nevertheless prefer that we try to pursue courses of action that minimize the risk of disaster,
just as I would in real life.
I'm strongly hoping that Melia's quest doesn't become dominated by the mindset of "try to jump the canyon in our car, because nobody gets crushed in an accident in real life if we fail."
[CLARIFICATION: I am NOT attributing this mindset to you directly. I am describing it and expressing a hope that it will not become the prevailing mindset of the quest.]
