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Power Games (Nanoha fanfic)

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EarthScorpion said:
Look, we've been though this dull, dull song and dance several times before. You're not going to find "omg so awesome" Earth advantages in basic elements of science.

(In fact, modern Dimensional Space does not use nuclear fission, which is dirty and it's a pain dealing with the byproducts. They do, however, use nuclear fusion for electricity generation - because containment is soooooooooo much easier to deal with when you have magical forcefields)
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Well I was thinking that we haven't seen any magical spells that work via splitting atom yet and wait... -_-

You're not going to find "omg so awesome" Earth advantages in basic elements of science.
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This looks very specific.

Other then for chocolate Earth has nothing special in a valuable way for people in D space right?
 
EarthScorpion said:
Honestly, you guys keep on exaggerating the chocolate thing.

We have repeatedly seen chocolate as a bitter drink in DSpace, drunk in a similar way to coffee. It just isn't served as a waxy sweet block thing.
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I bring up the chocolate because is amuses me greatly. Otherwise I personally doubt earth has anything of importance in it, at least until you avoided answering the question. -_-
 
EarthScorpion said:
No. It's not.

Oh, they can totally go to the Outer System. There's just no point. Oh yeah, sure, go to the uninhabitable radioactive hellholes of Jupiter's moons. And then you can... uh, take some pictures or whatevs. And then come back, because you're sure as hell not going to be staying there long term if you have any other options.

(Incidentally, manned missions are pretty dumb IRL anyway. Send robots instead, so you don't need to heft meatbags, their life support, all the fuel needed to carry that extra mass, and you don't need to more than double the fuel so you can come back)
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Hey now, if you're a large actor with responsible governance yet wanna conduct hush hush research on x-risk lost logia bioweapons, why not conduct that research on, say, Saturn IX in an otherwise obscure type-1a system?

I mean, if something goes wrong, what's the risk of someone stumbling upon the fallout for the next couple of centuries?
 
I finally got around to reading this story, since I liked most of ES and Aleph's other stuff. It was pretty great. Not much else to say, beyond that I now have a fondness for post-post-post apocalypse settings.
 
Tahu1809 said:
So in summery: there is no room built for a back door crossover with Mass Effect, Halo, Schlock Mercenary, Stargate, Tenchi Muyo, Aliens/ Predator, Star Wars, or Star Trek. If you want to see Nanoha fight Klingon's go wright you own story. That said to show that there are no hard feeling let me give you some fluff.
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If you want to write such a crossover, go ahead - feel free. Just remember that the set-up here is intentionally dissimilar to most sci-fi set ups. The TSAB has the option of simply refusing to engage with hostile aliens showing up - and so probably wouldn't, if they weren't amenable to talking. Why throw away lives when you can quarantine off the dimension in question, and then observe them from extradimensional vantage points? Especially since if they don't have dimensional travel already, you want to avoid giving them any clues, and that means avoiding interaction.

(Also, Nanoha vs Aliens just ends in Nanoha deploying a Wide Area Search, finding the xenomorph, and slapping binds on them. And Nanoha vs Predator involves Nanoha and Vesta demonstrating that they're better at being invisible hunters with a much, much bigger beam weapon than the Predator's shouldercaster.)

But there's absolutely no chance of it happening here, because this is not a crossover.
 
TheLastOne said:
Or not, because FTL, Relativity, Causality.

Pick two.

Oh, and we know Relativity works.
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I'll take the first two, and hope for quantum mechanics to kill any paradoxes before they happen. :)

I don't have great hopes for FTL, and if it's possible at all I expect it'll look something like a Krasnikov tube network, but I won't rule it out just yet.

Also, this is a nice story idea.
 
I'm not sure if this has been brought up before but ...

how do most magic/dimensionally aware worlds view mental illness, in the sense of how do they treat them? how obvious does a mental illness have to be for them to notice it? are their programs to help the afflicted individual? are there many illnesses that we on earth would not know of*?

I ask this because of a few mental illnesses** I have myself that I wouldn't be surprised if they did or didn't go unnoticed in other worlds

* like things caused by alhazredian tampering
** some technically are not illnesses but just makes my brain work differently but still just as good
 
One thing these discussion made me think about, though.

Is there some worlds (let's assume type 1 which are the most likely to have condition suitable for life) where life evolved in a different way, but still resulting in intelligent (but non-human) life?

I mean, I see no reason why this should be impossible, and provided enough worlds (though is there enough worlds?), it would probably happen, somewhere. Of course, then the question is whether this somewhere is close enough to interact with (and survived to this day, too).
 
Bki said:
One thing these discussion made me think about, though.

Is there some worlds (let's assume type 1 which are the most likely to have condition suitable for life) where life evolved in a different way, but still resulting in intelligent (but non-human) life?

I mean, I see no reason why this should be impossible, and provided enough worlds (though is there enough worlds?), it would probably happen, somewhere. Of course, then the question is whether this somewhere is close enough to interact with (and survived to this day, too).
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IIRC It was stated somewhere that the Alhazerdians encountered some kind of sapient bird people during their conquests. Not much is known about these birds because the Alhazerdians being who they are promptly started nuking them into extinction.
 
Kita Nakeshi said:
I'm not sure if this has been brought up before but ...

how do most magic/dimensionally aware worlds view mental illness, in the sense of how do they treat them? how obvious does a mental illness have to be for them to notice it? are their programs to help the afflicted individual? are there many illnesses that we on earth would not know of*?

I ask this because of a few mental illnesses** I have myself that I wouldn't be surprised if they did or didn't go unnoticed in other worlds

* like things caused by alhazredian tampering
** some technically are not illnesses but just makes my brain work differently but still just as good
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Since the Gamesverse is fundamentally a space opera kinda setting that pretends to be a magical girl setting, it treats them in much the kind of way you'd expect Star Trek pretending to be a magical girl series would.

That is to say, with kind words, therapy, and understanding, aided by magic drugs.

We saw that with Mei, who got some counselling after her neurological condition was diagnosed, and an implant dispensing drugs that helps mitigate the results of the genetic tampering (and a note in her file so anyone who winds up with her as a subordinate knows that she's going to be a bit of a rash hothead even with the drugs).

Walker Of Chaos said:
IIRC It was stated somewhere that the Alhazerdians encountered some kind of sapient bird people during their conquests. Not much is known about these birds because the Alhazerdians being who they are promptly started nuking them into extinction.
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Well, they were smart, somewhat bird-like Type-4 life. They were more at the "smart ape" level - primitive tools, basic communication... more like a bright chimp than even early anatomically modern H. sapiens.

They also had the misfortune of having very pretty plumage.
 
More specifically, humans are the only known sapient species to have evolved or been encountered. There's some fossil evidence of Type-4 bird-like creatures about nine millennia back that may have been intelligent, but it's unclear whether their tool use was "early homonid" or "much bigger crow", and how smart they were, exactly. Current guesses are that they were, as ES said, probably around the level of chimps.

They're only found on one world, indicating that they didn't have dimensional travel and that there hadn't been any dimensional splits in their recent evolutionary history, and they all went extinct very quickly. Which may have been a natural disaster, or it may have been early humans showing up - the two occurred close enough that the fossil record doesn't distinguish, but could easily have been a few centuries apart.
 
Bki said:
One thing these discussion made me think about, though.

Is there some worlds (let's assume type 1 which are the most likely to have condition suitable for life) where life evolved in a different way, but still resulting in intelligent (but non-human) life?

I mean, I see no reason why this should be impossible, and provided enough worlds (though is there enough worlds?), it would probably happen, somewhere. Of course, then the question is whether this somewhere is close enough to interact with (and survived to this day, too).
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There's Garyu, Lutecias summoned Kamen Rider Insect-man-thing, he seems intelligent from what I remember.
 
Bunkhead said:
There's Garyu, Lutecias summoned Kamen Rider Insect-man-thing, he seems intelligent from what I remember.
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In the Gamesverse, all of the Alpine bloodline summons are genetically encoded construct-weapons. Lu has a functioning Garyu, as does Megane. She's not really "summoning" so much as "manifesting".

It's just "Manifester" sounds like your job is to write-up manifestos.
 
EarthScorpion said:
In the Gamesverse, all of the Alpine bloodline summons are genetically encoded construct-weapons. Lu has a functioning Garyu, as does Megane. She's not really "summoning" so much as "manifesting".

It's just "Manifester" sounds like your job is to write-up manifestos.
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Poor Garyuu. It's a harsh, harsh AU that turns a character from an apparently sapient being into a spell effect.
 
Hey, the Wolkenritter are sapient beings who were created by a spell. So are Vesta and Arf. [1]

Summons don't hang around as long before being dismissed until the next time, and in most cases they aren't nearly as smart as a Familiar, but there's nothing saying they can't be at least ID-level-smart manifested mana constructs.

[1] Well, for given values of "a spell".
 
Aleph said:
Hey, the Wolkenritter are sapient beings who were created by a spell. So are Vesta and Arf. [1]

Summons don't hang around as long before being dismissed until the next time, and in most cases they aren't nearly as smart as a Familiar, but there's nothing saying they can't be at least ID-level-smart manifested mana constructs.

[1] Well, for given values of "a spell".
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Not least because at least some summoner lineages have persistence of their personal instances of their bloodline summons, which are serialised and stored when not instanced. This means, among other things, those kinds of summons "level up" as the summoner in question uses them more and more and trains with them.

(I'm not saying "totally like a pokemon", but I am thinking it)

Garyu is one of those serialised summons - which is why Megane's Garyu is rather more dangerous than Lu's will be when her mother starts training her.
 
EarthScorpion said:
In the Gamesverse, all of the Alpine bloodline summons are genetically encoded construct-weapons. Lu has a functioning Garyu, as does Megane. She's not really "summoning" so much as "manifesting".

It's just "Manifester" sounds like your job is to write-up manifestos.
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This contrasts whatever Alicia is doing when she manifests Wormy: There can't be genetic encoding of a construct there. It's making up a construct on the fly from available materials.. which might have some small similarities to the Familiar spell.

I hope we get to see Raising Heart and Bardiche manifest their own constructs at some point. Maybe when Nanoha or Fate get injured. They do seem to be locked down in the same way Alicia's is, and that didn't stop her from creating Wormy.
 
Aleph said:
Hey, the Wolkenritter are sapient beings who were created by a spell. So are Vesta and Arf. [1]

Summons don't hang around as long before being dismissed until the next time, and in most cases they aren't nearly as smart as a Familiar, but there's nothing saying they can't be at least ID-level-smart manifested mana constructs.

[1] Well, for given values of "a spell".
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I think what's creeping me out is continuity of consciousness? "Summon" implies "this critter was over there, and now it's here." But the way Gamesverse summons were explained in the infodumps, they don't exist when they're not present (as opposed to, say, the Wolkenritter, who are theoretically running full-time on Reinforce's systems whether or not they have incarnated mana-construct bodies and are just in "sleep mode" when not in use). So, there's no "Garyuu" per se, but "a series of Garyuus, each of whom has a life span of 'from when I summoned him to when I dismissed him.'"

Ergo, the creepy part. I found Garyuu being a simulated non-sapient intelligence run by the magical program manifested within the spell encoded in the Alpine bloodline sad 'cause I kind of liked Kamen Rider Bug. He was a big sweetie to Lulu. But the idea that he's a sapient program is chilling, since the summoning seems a lot like "I'm creating sapient life! And then I'm snuffing out my creation because it's more convenient not to keep on with the upkeep!" Which, if I remember correctly, is part of canon familiar creation that Gamesverse decided to do away with because, well, it's horrifying.

Edit: Please explain why I'm wrong. :)
 
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pressea said:
Wait, THAT'S what ancestral human means? I was assuming Nanoha, Hayate, and Momoko had some kind of Alhazredian spell-cracking ability that turned out to be hilariously effective in a way that would completely terrify the people who developed it when used on modern, simpler, more efficient spells.

What the hell is a world without any historical magic use doing with something like that? This is either going to be super-spoily plot or completely irrelevant to the story and I have no idea which.
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Tallamee said:
It is easy to forget, what with all of the planet colonizing and Lost Logia creation, but the original Priest-Kings of Alhazred were normal and unmodified humans. The genetic engineering came after their rise, and was something that the natives of Alhazred figured out how to do in a time when they were still working on the whole agriculture thing. And they did this as normal humans.

I, for one, am not comforted in the least by the knowledge that Nanoha is a normal human. So were the original mages of Alhazred, and look what kind of chaos they caused.
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The important thing to remember is Nanoha doesn't have the genetic mods the rest of the population does. Some of those mods seriously altered how things might manifest. Jail? He now has direct (and easy) access to pre-modified "ancestral human" genetics (with the 'source' being a decently powerful mage as a very nice added bonus), and can, if he so chose, mess with it in new and exciting ways, and not have to worry about 'complications' due to all those Alhazred genetic modifications (and potential artificial limitations and barriers) accidentally screwing those experiments up.

So Jail could potentially create new bloodlines based on Nanoha's DNA, but it seems to me that the fact that Nanoha's DNA was never messed with means he could also use Nanoha's DNA as a means of figuring out what was added (along with 'where' in the genomes) with the rest of the Numbers and start tweaking their DNA using CRISPR technologies (using Nanoha's DNA as a 'base' to use for comparison and contrast while 'improving' the Numbers). And that's not touching on how Jail could make 'potential mods' for Nanoha herself and then asking her what she herself might want.

Of course, Jail could also use Nanoha's DNA to make 'diseases' that remove the more 'annoying' inbuilt limitations from the general population while leaving the rest of the modifications alone (unlikely, though technically 'possible' as something he 'could' do. Likely to do? Eh, not really). Or make those 'new bloodlines' and add some new members to the Takamachi family (something Jail should know that could piss Nanoha and the rest off if done without their knowledge or permission).

Or Jail could use 'this' to try and tie Fate/Nanoha/Alicia/Arf/Vesta to the rest of the Numbers as a 'family' while asking Nanoha and the rest what they want to do with the options available.

Or Aleph could just ignore it and it would never come up.:tongue:
 
DezoPenguin said:
I think what's creeping me out is continuity of consciousness?
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To quote Alistair Young, "Interruptions in consciousness can't cause a break in identity because we sleep, which interrupts our narrative thread of consciousness. Except, [some] argue, it doesn't. Which we could argue and I'd be prepared to argue: we certainly have some type of consciousness going on in REM sleep, but it gets a lot more dubious in deeper sleep states than that.
But in any case, and here's my point: it doesn't matter, because sleep is only the least of the interruptions in consciousness which can be examined. There are also unconsciousness, anaesthesia, coma (natural), coma (medically induced), various states of suppressed brain activity using TMR, extreme hypothermia simulating brain death, and seizure disorders which may not suppress all electrical activity in the brain, but do derange it all to hell. [...] In short: people have come back from having a null electroencephalogram, which is to say a complete absence of consciousness and indeed dynamic mind-state. (Which is why checking for brain death in a medical context requires a sustained absence of such, not just noticing said absence is present.)" – the point being that since the consciousness interruptions that we know do not fundamentaly change people, there is no reason to assume that interruptions caused by future tech (or, in this case, magic), will be different.
 
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