- Location
- The Howling
In that case are there any worlds that have gods in his range. I'm thinking maybe dresden files but I'm not real familiar with that series so I'm not sure.
Lest A Monster I Become [Multiple][Pseudo-SI]
- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Correct. It's because the prayer rituals involve sacrificing bound familiars raised for the purpose of being sacrificed, in order to generate droplets of Philosopher's Stone liquid. Those droplets being physical objects can then be shipped along the regular shipping channels between dimensions. As of this point in the story, the Jovians are working on adapting the rituals to work with the dragons' heartstones as well, so that the arcane (extraplanar) on top of the eldritch (extradimensional) energy can be accumulated into the Red Sign as well, thus creating a more diverse base of power for the Jovians.
I mean, there may be but Dresden Files wouldn't be one of them. It's too high on the magic scale just like Percy Jackson is. Spice and Wolf on the other hand would be in range, though it would be ... difficult ... to get any utility out of the existence of the gods in that setting. There's also GoT/ASoIaF, though that has the typical drawback of eldritch gribblies that like to do horribad things to people and aren't well-defined enough to risk being defeatable by Andes (at least, not without breaking the setting enough to draw the attention of Still Higher Powers).
I will note that what's in range for his power is not the absolute limit of what he can reach. There's already been two methods introduced to the story that allow travel to places his innate reality-hopping ability can't get to on their own. (Eldritch riftgates gave us the steampunk wuxia world; and the incident with Cloak gave us the dimensional sling tech.) They each have their own other limitations, mind you.
As an aside; the philosopher stone tithe doesn't just go to Andes. Each Seeker's familiar sacrificing rite in general produces about two droplets every month (better ritualists produce more, novices produce less). They then each give up half of what they produce to the Bearer who leads the congregation of 100 Seekers. The Bearer absorbs the droplets themselves, and then performs the same sacrificial rite to give up half of what that Bearer just gained. This has the effect of "synchronizing" the stone material to reduce the difficulty of its absorption, and empowers the Bearers as eldritch necromancers. The Bearers then ship their product to the High Circle, the thirteen leaders of the Seeker cult. They in turn each work together to absorb the Bearer's tithe, and keep one third of that total themselves (split equally amongst the thirteen). The High Circle and Bearers all carry incomplete copies of the Red Sign within them, which this also empowers/reinforces the actual Red Sign.
The remaining two thirds of the Bearer's tithe is what makes it to Andes himself for absorption into the actual thing.
The point behind all of that is to speed up absorption and distribute the concentration of power so that it can exist locally even without Andes physically being there. This also acts as a backup; to completely destroy Andes' eldritch godsoul requires that every last Bearer be killed. And there's more than 80 million of them spread across seven inhabited dimensions and another dozen dead dimensions. Should Andes be completely killed somehow, the Bearers could use their connection to his soul -- and a big whopper of a necromantic sacrifice -- to bring him back. This assuming all the other methods for reviving him don't pan out, like the Cylon resurrection and the Altered Carbon stack backups.
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Man that reminds me of hellsing abridged that's step one what about two through ten.
Really I think the most op thing the Jovians could get is to take a step back from constantly reverse engineering and really up their personal creativity somehow. Find something unique to them.
So would the Winnower and Gardener from destiny be the Auditor and Author of the Destiny verse? Is it possible for other Authors and Auditors to go rogue with their story a d provide direct help to their creations?
- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
No. The Winnower and Gardener are both part of Destiny canon. They are both thus the creations of an Author -- the same Author. Authors and Auditors are not opposition forces, and they are never a part of their own canon. Authors create the canon. Auditors are Author-like-entities that reconcile conflicts between Authors whose canons (multiversal subsets) are too close to one another to avoid coming into conflict.
Authors cannot go rogue with regards to their canons for the simple reason that they (unless acted upon externally) are the reason for everything that happens within that 'Verse anyhow.
Probably, actually. Given the scale many of the beings there operate at, and how poorly defined a lot of it is, going there wouldn't necessarily be the safest thing to do.
Not only that, at the end of the first movie the camera pans out of Earth and we see that the Milky Way is also inside a marble and that an incomprehensibly huge hand is playing marbles with it and other galaxies.
And it could be marbles all the way down. So yeah, not exactly the safest place to go to.
- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
The Wisdom of Bruce Leroy | Philosphy & Spirituality in The Last Dragon | The Last Dragon Tribute
Beneath the 80's hair & homages to Bruce Lee The Last dragon is a spiritual & philosophical movie about the importance of believing in yourself, finding balance & understanding all facets of your emotions.
www.thelastdragontribute.com
It's literally that. I've "ruled" that it's functionally xianxia soul cultivation; The Glow is "the last mystery" of martial arts attainment -- it manifests when the student achieves perfect unity between their mind, body, and soul.
It doesn't change the absorption of the Red Sign; if anything having the Sign makes it harder to achieve the necessary unity of all aspects of self.
What it does do, however, is allow the attainee to exceed their natural limits by allowing them to call on every aspect of their existence for any given action taken. In other words, someone with The Glow could expend physical stamina to perform necromantic acts instead of burning their actual soul.
In other words, it lets you spend from any of your resource pools to empower any action you take, regardless of if this is normally possible.
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Wow lol that combined with certain magic types sounds op as hell wait does that mean you could sacrifice stamina instead parts of your soul for alchemy? Like in full metal you can use your own soul as a philosopher stone in a pinch but with the glow can you get around that?The Wisdom of Bruce Leroy | Philosphy & Spirituality in The Last Dragon | The Last Dragon Tribute
Beneath the 80's hair & homages to Bruce Lee The Last dragon is a spiritual & philosophical movie about the importance of believing in yourself, finding balance & understanding all facets of your emotions.
It's literally that. I've "ruled" that it's functionally xianxia soul cultivation; The Glow is "the last mystery" of martial arts attainment -- it manifests when the student achieves perfect unity between their mind, body, and soul.
It doesn't change the absorption of the Red Sign; if anything having the Sign makes it harder to achieve the necessary unity of all aspects of self.
What it does do, however, is allow the attainee to exceed their natural limits by allowing them to call on every aspect of their existence for any given action taken. In other words, someone with The Glow could expend physical stamina to perform necromantic acts instead of burning their actual soul.
In other words, it lets you spend from any of your resource pools to empower any action you take, regardless of if this is normally possible.
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- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Yes, with efficiency limitations, that's exactly what it means.
It also means that anything which might erode or damage one part of those things will have that "damage" spread out, barring structural stuff. So with The Glow, a person on the verge of bleeding out from a wound could still function normally, but won't necessarily close those wounds. Similarly, corrosive effects to the soul that wear it away wouldn't prevent the use of the Glow to cause the soul to function normally; but something just straight taking a bite out of it would still have whatever impact that missing that particular bit would have.
So for example; a secondary stack back up copy of Andes would still suffer for the absence of the power of the Red Sign within him, but could conceivably operate normally by fueling the emptiness from his psionic energies instead. It wouldn't be the same, but he'd at least be functional. Until the hyperplanar tap running his psi amp burned out from overuse anyhow.
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That's crazy good then man actually facing jovians in a ground battle must be terrifying. Placing aside the weapons they have it would be like fighting an army of monk wizard gestalts.
- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Jovian ground battle... Is mostly fought by non sapient constructs, actually; they wouldn't be able to achieve The Glow.
That being said, the doctrine tends to fall on the "biblical plague" scale of encounters. The most common bodyplan used would fit the Seeker stealth robot enemies from X-COM:EW, but obviously upgraded with every ounce of Jovian tech. This is not limited to but includes the use of collimated sonic pulse plasma beam weapons for their main weapons, phase rifle weapons (with 8th-ray kinetic impact augmentation) on each tentacle, skrill blister point defense CIWS, dual parapsionic-enabled biobot neural clusters (one to operate the telekinetic field via psi-amp, one to "merge" with the Mektoid-grade psi shield emitter), kara'kesh (upgraded) personal shield emitters, the full standard biotic suite (dash/charge, slam, barrier, warp), personal biomechanoid armor with regenerative healing emitters and structural reinforcement) all powered by a quartet of personal hyperplanar taps. Each combat drone would have at least five non-sapient Host Pearls; one as overall command and comms, one on defensive oversight, one for maneuvers, one for immediate combat, and one as combat engineer/medic to the platform itself.
As to eldritch combat capabilities; each would have a standard Dho-Na Curve rig, for personal use; Class 4 personal wards with anti-perception glamour, and all weapons would include class 4 banishment effectors as well. This isn't the best the Jovians can do for personal use, but it's designed for ruggedness and mass production.
That is the description of the extremely disposable infantry troops. Each dimension the Jovians have inhabited has turned that dimension's Callisto into a military forgeworld where they churn out massive numbers and keep them in cold storage waiting for deployment, along with embedding extra numbers in stealthed depots in asteroid moons captured by that Jupiter's gravity well.
Any supernatural or higher being or so on that's beyond the grunt drones to face would be confronting the Jovian Shades, who are like Commander Shaleson -- half-ascended with heavy emphasis on the development of personal soul spaces like Andes, and implanted with the Taelon meridians, carrying Manta-grade photon-ray cannon weapons and hyperplanar taps in their souls, along with the best psi amps and Dho-Na Curvature gear they can fit within. This is vehicle-grade stuff. These would be your "warrior wizard monks", as they get extensive combat training with full range of parapsionic and biotic abilities on top of training to develop The Glow and all of the abilities you gain from being a literal energy being.
The standard upgrade from there includes the use of militarized voidshuttles as armored personnel carriers with Manta oversight for CAP. The voidshuttles utilize wraith culling beam technology to be able to deploy hundreds of the Grunts in mere seconds without even slowing down for the LZ... all of which would be the initial spread deployment for interdimensional gate receivers to be deployed and allow sustained delivery of further troops directly to the theater of operations.
Actual combat with these things... Well. There are 1.5 trillion sapient Jovians. There are ten times as many non sapient biobots just in regular civilian functions that will be visible within Jovian culture. There are maybe seven trillion Grunts in storage; but the Callisto forges mostly spend their time ensuring their strategic resource reserves to extremely rapidly produce more of the things are kept up to snuff, and focus on developing the capacity to rapidly produce new warmachinery. The methods for this include the use of bioslurry nanoforges and star trek style industrial replicators fed with 9th-ray "ontokinetic" reserves (ontokinetic meaning able to manipulate the existence of things). They literally whoosh the things out of thin air and tentacle sprayed goo. By contrast, there are perhaps 60 billion Shades in service. Mostly deployed to the Stargate 'Verse, where their current doctrinal stance is that it would take at least 100 Shades to equal one Alteran in a fight. (Numerically there are more Ancients than there are Shades still, which means they don't even have the personnel to so more than sting a full commitment by the Alterans should it come to it. Of course, the Alterans have fully committed to their energy being existence now and as a result have no direct answer to the Stellar Converter strategic weapons that the Jovians could deploy into the higher planes they exist at by having Shades act as weapons spotters.)
So yes. A ground war with the Jovians would not go well for anyone they might actually face right now.
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- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Yup. But then again, the C-Space races were never in the running to count as any kind of enemy to the Jovians, were they?
I'm sorry, this is much more an explanation as to why you would need triple layers of Depends, even before you get into everything after that.
Was that intentional? Only, see, I've got a bunch of Asari on hold, apparently Asari Commandos don't buy Depends....
- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Well, it's all a question of scale, really. You also want to take into account the potential specially-tailored equipment designed to combat that specific enemy. Like in the case of the Asari commandos, where their eezo would stop working (both their equipment's and their biotics) but the Jovians' wouldn't. And the wide-area-broadcast telepathic terror broadcasts and bodyjacking.
And then there's the things the Jovians consider actual weaponry. Like their domesticated home-grown infovores. A deployment of a single infovore on Thessia would result in every Asari simply dropping over dead for no visible reason simultaneously, and the same happening to every sapient being that ever steps on the planet again.
Even the ones in NBC gear.
And also the ones who connect to any wireless data transfer nodes on the planet.
But not to the Jovians.
....
Soooo.... what you're saying is, I need at least half a dozen plus one layers of Depends for the Asari Commandos?
...Well, at least that's cheaper than the basic load of ammo.
- Location
- A big rock
I just finished binging everything that's been posted, and I loved all of it. I've really enjoyed seeing marks growth, both in his "image" as an all-knowing god and the ways he's learned from his mistakes. I've also really enjoyed the society of the hosts, and wish we could see more stuff from either their perspective or populations that interact with the Jovian league.
- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Work killed my chapter for this week on account of being on-call and incidents happening, or you would have maybe seen more along these lines already.
I appreciate that the growth of Andes in the role of being powerful (in every sense of the word) has come across to you, as that really was the original intent of my story. It will remain such going forward, but it's barely spoiler territory to admit that you'll start seeing much more of the Hosts as people and the society they've developed, as well as the non-Host societies Andes has left his mark in.
One hint of a spoiler for you guys to sink your teeth into is to think about how many non-Host societies the Jovians have a regular presence amongst and how the Hosts insistence that no one ever doubt Andes' divinity in their presence might affect those societies.
Case in point; it's been forty years of this for the CAE, and the CAE are comprised of the Earths that the FER wrote off to the 'maggs. That Andes was responsible for both liberating, and saving from the Polonium Weapon. And sending automail prosthetics specialists in the form of Host doctors to restore sight to the hundreds of millions who were "harvested for their delicacies" by the Kromagg.