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Path of the Immeasurable Swarm [Worm/Cradle]

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Phoenix_Ride said:
Provided you don't have 21 Monarchs who refuse to ascend, if a system was created that could safely manage up to 20 Monarch's worth of hunger madra for energy, what would be problem long term?
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Long term the problem is that the founding assumption of <=20 Monarchs will be violated, if Monarchs are possible at all.

Either by the obvious Monarch creep as people choose to become Monarchs knowing there's already 20.

Or by unknown Monarchs screwing things up: see Northstrider pretending to be dead and thus being uncounted. Or both.

Any system that does not enforce the actual prevention of failure states will, sooner or later, succumb to them.

Now, if something can be put in place that flat out prevents Sages or Heralds from becoming Monarchs, or prevents anyone from becoming either Sages (probably not possible, since Icons seem to be from outside Cradle)) or Heralds (perhaps by changing world-rules for Remnants to make it impossible to fuse with them) then forcibly Ascending all existing violators (perhaps manually) and thus prevent anyone from being both at once, since only one is left.

Beyond that, yeah, auto-kick or make Cradle able to safely handle any number of Monarchs.
 
Hunger madra is weird because it is supposed to be damage, but it's still energy, so it sounds like it shouldn't work like damage--if it's energy, it sounds like you could use it for something or even drain it away. If the presence of Monarchs was causing something that's more clearly damage, like making it hard to advance, it wouldn't make sense to say "maybe we could drain away the difficulty-to-advance and use it for things".
 
Chaos Theory said:
I'm quite sure that the Worm multiverse works so differently from other iterations because it is not an iteration. The scale is simply too far off, the Abidan manage 10,000 iterations at a time while the wormverse consists of more than 1E80 universes. And each Worm universe is infinitely more complex than an iteration as it isn't centered around a single life supporting planet but has many. More human lives were at risk during Gold Morning than the Abidan have shepherded in their entire history and it is not even close. More likely we are dealing with a multiverse of multiverses.
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If you are right that raises a new question on how entities can connect so many universes without fiends or corruption showing up everywhere.
 
My biggest issue with all of this autokick of Monarch, Heralds, and Sages talk, is that at some point fairly quickly this process will become known and suddenly no one is going to want to try to advance to any of these levels. Then what problems would this cause with whatever the next realm is called. It seems that they want Monarchs to ascend, that new people are needed in the next realm, otherwise why try to get Mercy to kill one of the Monarchs with Penance as the only way to survive would have been to ascend. Why else make it so Monarchs can stay on Cradle for as long as they want? Any autokick ability could have been set up by the original seven if they had wanted to. There must be some reason that Monarchs have always been allowed to stay. There must be some reason that Monarchs, Heralds, and Sages have been allowed at all.

Remember, most of those who reach those levels of power usually have some sort of responsibilities that are going to tie them to Cradle for at least several months after they hit those levels no matter what. Of the named Monarchs in the story so far, only Northstrider and the dragon had no real ties to Cradle as Monarchs because of their own philosophies. One was basically Might Makes Right and therefore proved himself a coward and the other had no subjects or vassals to take care of. Every other Monarch has vassals, subjects, and family that them leaving, especially with little or no notice, would have caused massive damage and lose of life. And remember, it would take months to years for the Dreadgods to disappear even if every Monarch, Herald, and Sage were to leave Cradle all at once.
 
I mean, another problem is that directly tampering with the rules of the iteration like this is almost certain to immediately attract the attentions of the Abidan, and Taylor's not quite in a good enough position yet to negotiate without Eithan doing something he'd very clearly rather not.
 
arromdee said:
Hunger madra is weird because it is supposed to be damage, but it's still energy, so it sounds like it shouldn't work like damage--if it's energy, it sounds like you could use it for something or even drain it away. If the presence of Monarchs was causing something that's more clearly damage, like making it hard to advance, it wouldn't make sense to say "maybe we could drain away the difficulty-to-advance and use it for things".
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From what I understand, hunger madra is the power to take from others for your own benefit. It is, literally, selfishness given "physical" form. This is my problem with the "divert hunger madra to the shards and allow them to use it up", I don't think it is possible, even for a Ghost, to make hunger madra do anything that doesn't involve consuming something else. So you could divert hunger madra to a Shard, but to use that hunger up the Shard would have to suck the life force out of people or devour crops or something else that involves taking from others.
 
Jen T said:
I mean, another problem is that directly tampering with the rules of the iteration like this is almost certain to immediately attract the attentions of the Abidan, and Taylor's not quite in a good enough position yet to negotiate without Eithan doing something he'd very clearly rather not.
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That is definitely the current limitation, but it probably should be noted that when she was meditating on her connection to the Crown Icon the Strands of Unity was a secondary interpretation of her connection to it. Her first interpretation of it was that if the laws of reality wanted to get between her and her happy ending they would break before her will.

So, at the very least from a thematic standpoint, give her and Hera enough time and that problem will solve itself. And given that they are currently asking Eithan that very question he will probably advise waiting as well, unless it could be disguised as them not screwing with fate.
 
Although a lot of noise has been made about hunger being the product of corruption and such, do the Abidan actually have a problem with it? Obviously its existence is bad for Cradle as an Iteration, but the Abidan seem perfectly happy to accept recruits who have made use of it like Northstrider, and it doesn't seem to interfere with their fate calculations the way actual chaos contamination and stuff like the fiends from Asylum do.
 
Hunger 'corruption' is part of the natural order of Cradle though. It's corruptive in the sense that it's selfishness made form and the world breaking down because of decisions of the powerful, but there's no evidence that Cradle being destroyed by dread/hunger isn't the Iteration's Fate. It doesn't spill out into broader Way, does it?
 
viralstitch said:
Hunger 'corruption' is part of the natural order of Cradle though. It's corruptive in the sense that it's selfishness made form and the world breaking down because of decisions of the powerful, but there's no evidence that Cradle being destroyed by dread/hunger isn't the Iteration's Fate. It doesn't spill out into broader Way, does it?
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This description also seems to perfectly fit with the entities relationship with the Worm multiverse as well. I wonder if the author will bring up the parallels.
 
Jen T said:
I mean, another problem is that directly tampering with the rules of the iteration like this is almost certain to immediately attract the attentions of the Abidan, and Taylor's not quite in a good enough position yet to negotiate without Eithan doing something he'd very clearly rather not.
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I think that it was implied that while yes it would draw attention that there would be no reason for the Abidan to see it as something other than an extremely skilled/knowledgable person finding out how to directly manipulate the Way while still on Cradle, and then using that ability to reshape the rules of the iteration until there is no more Hunger Madra.
I think it was implied that both Ozmanthus and the OG Abidan Court knew how to do the same thing. But before the Dreadgods the dreadbeast problem was more manageable and so they didn't feel the need to mess around with the rules of the world for what was ultimately a large but manageable problem, instead of the FUBAR situation they have today.
It was probably a mutually assured destruction kind of situation. Yes you could solve the current issue with one nuke, but how can you be sure there wouldn't be another nuke flying at you. So better not to risk it.
 
fltadmdragonborn said:
Remember, most of those who reach those levels of power usually have some sort of responsibilities that are going to tie them to Cradle for at least several months after they hit those levels no matter what. Of the named Monarchs in the story so far, only Northstrider and the dragon had no real ties to Cradle as Monarchs because of their own philosophies. One was basically Might Makes Right and therefore proved himself a coward and the other had no subjects or vassals to take care of. Every other Monarch has vassals, subjects, and family that them leaving, especially with little or no notice, would have caused massive damage and lose of life. And remember, it would take months to years for the Dreadgods to disappear even if every Monarch, Herald, and Sage were to leave Cradle all at once.
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He had control of half the continent and his presence stopped Malice hunting dragons for sport. So saying he had no reason not to ascend isn't really correct, even if he isn't a civilization believer.
 
Phoenix_Ride said:
Just because the Soulsmiths of the past failed to contain Hunger doesn't mean that it's impossible to succeed.
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Less about it being impossible, and more that if you just ignore the stress, eventually bad stuff will happen, the world was perfectly capable of dealing with with a dozen monarchs for presumably thousands of years, you can probably solve it, but what if it is twenty? Thirty monarchs?

Eventually it wouldn't be just hunger.
Phoenix_Ride said:
Provided you don't have 21 Monarchs who refuse to ascend, if a system was created that could safely manage up to 20 Monarch's worth of hunger madra for energy, what would be problem long term?
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There wouldn't be a problem, I just doubt it will stay below the max number.
 
derivativeoflife said:
Consider that of the six Monarchs currently on Cradle, four of them have manifested the Crown Icon. And yet, the Akura clan has never recorded the existence of a Crown Sage even once in our archives. There's a reason for that."
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I was re-reading and I just remembered this little factoid - Taylor's also an overachiever with her (well, Hera's) manifestation of the Crown Icon before ascending to Monarch, and Malice wasn't even dead yet either. All it took was just utterly dominating the will of a Dreadgod momentarily. No biggie.
 
kaidash said:
He had control of half the continent and his presence stopped Malice hunting dragons for sport. So saying he had no reason not to ascend isn't really correct, even if he isn't a civilization believer.
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He was also far older then Malice as one of the oldest and strongest of the currant Monarchs before his death and His philosophy of basically Might makes Right means that, no, he didn't care about the survival of other dragons. If they needed his help to survive then they were to weak to survive as far as he was concerned. And I believe that Malice's hatred of dragons was actually his fault to begin with, as in he or his philosophy destroyed part of Malice's family or home long before she became Monarch. So no, he had no reason not to ascend other then petty greed to destroy what he didn't like and the fear of no longer being one of the strongest beings around. The fact is that he was one of the main reasons Malice couldn't ascend, because of he would have done exactly like what he did in story unless the Akura already had a new Monarch.
 
TheOneUnknown said:
I was re-reading and I just remembered this little factoid - Taylor's also an overachiever with her (well, Hera's) manifestation of the Crown Icon before ascending to Monarch, and Malice wasn't even dead yet either. All it took was just utterly dominating the will of a Dreadgod momentarily. No biggie.
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I think taking over almost every parahuman alive and defeating Scion is how Taylor got a connection to the crown icon. In the case of Queen Administrator/Hera it's that she was literally designed for controlling other creatures with memories of doing it going back at least 3 million years.
 
Aeshdan said:
From what I understand, hunger madra is the power to take from others for your own benefit. It is, literally, selfishness given "physical" form. This is my problem with the "divert hunger madra to the shards and allow them to use it up", I don't think it is possible, even for a Ghost, to make hunger madra do anything that doesn't involve consuming something else. So you could divert hunger madra to a Shard, but to use that hunger up the Shard would have to suck the life force out of people or devour crops or something else that involves taking from others.
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What if the setup uses hunger madra more like a double edged sword, so it still symbolically corrupts / consumes something - any new Monarchs can push on this "hunger madra spring" for ~100 years with little effort, but past that - at whatever point it would kill them, it starts taking from them - they have to use more and more of their power, time, and focus to keep it all from rebounding back on them. Come up with more and more elaborate plans to survive the rebound. If a Monarch fights to the bitter end, it builds up so much that it spills out and hurts others too.

There's still an incentive to be a Monarch, 100 years of dominion, it's flexible, in that you can overstay, but as you do it increases the cost to the world when you leave, and there's a big incentive to others to kick you out if you try, before it gets bad. Maybe when the hunger spills back in, it specifically tries to consume /that Monarch/, going after everything associated with them, so if a Monarch wants to preserve their legacy, they have to leave.

Go even farther, cap n' trade for hunger madra, so you could stay around indefinitely only if you are constantly graduating monarchs to eat up your hunger debt before 100 years lol
 
Reading Threshold, and Christ, the current state of the Abidan will push a lot of Taylor's big buttons. Especially if they play the fuck fuck games some did against Lindon and the incompetence Northstrider had to endure in his test on her and Hera.
 
Arcman said:
Reading Threshold, and Christ, the current state of the Abidan will push a lot of Taylor's big buttons. Especially if they play the fuck fuck games some did against Lindon and the incompetence Northstrider had to endure in his test on her and Hera.
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My opinion is once the other factions (including the Albion) find out the about Worm multiverse and the entities there is going to be a massive fight for control over the Worm multiverse. It's sheer size and the possibility of creating superweapons (entities with authority) is going to force every faction into a frenzy. The fact that the entities can have so many universes interacting with each over without fiends showing up everywhere should also be a big deal to the Albion. So, they might behave completely differently than in canon out of necessity (and to get information from Hera about the entities and the Worm multiverse).
I wonder how they will react to the age of the Worm multiverse.
 
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