Troy Guffey
Irresponsible Parasite
- Location
- Western Missouri, USA
Remember, Harry's got TWO daughters! One with Susan, the other with Lash.
Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)
- Thread starter Derek M
- Start date
- Crossover
- Location
- Maryland
Um, if you're talking about the revelations in Skin Game, Harry doesn't really have any idea of that, as he starts this story right after the events in Changes. I also have no idea where Butcher is taking that, given that he seems to be focusing on traditional fantasy for the time being.
- Location
- Launceston, Tasmania
Is it a sign that I read to much HP if when I first saw that line, I wondered when Susan Bones and Mistress Lash appeared?
Troy Guffey
Irresponsible Parasite
- Location
- Western Missouri, USA
Yes. Yes, it is.
ecs05norway
Zenryoku Zenkai!
I suggest Children of an Elder God, then. Because you know NGE is dark when exposure to Eldritch Abominations actually makes Shinji better.
As for the Alien3 folks, yes, the hibernaculae were all in one capsule. If they picked up Ellen, then Newt, Hicks, and what's left of Bishop are still with them and should be just fine.
Killing them off for no reason at this stage would be ... pointless.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Allegedly ZPMs are using Zero-point energy, not anything involving other dimensions. Possibly more accurately they're using energy from the false vacuum, and, the reason they have limits is that drawing more energy would 'damage reality', in undefined but almost certainly very unpleasant ways (see 'collapse of the false vacuum').
The business of dimensions being involved might come from the idea that ZPMs have a highly managed area of space-time within them, from which they draw power. While supposedly not anything like a black/white hole this volume is so distorted it might almost be considered another dimension.
Yes, I know we're talking fictional super-science, here, but the creators generally try and at least point in the direction of existing theories.
It's a plot point in the Stargate Atlantis stories that all ZPMs look the same and, when first used, had the same power supply characteristics. It's possible that even the tech of the Ancients couldn't (safely) make them smaller. Does make them an interesting 'magic currency', though...
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Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
Not out of nowhere, out of miniature artificial alternate subspace universes. A ZPM is basically the container for an artificial black/worm hole (the 'zero point' or singularity in question) that leads to a subspace dimension created at the same time. The ZPM pulls vacuum energy out of the dimension until it reaches maximum entropy and collapses, which means that ZPMs are technically batteries rather than generators.
Where exactly the energy comes from/how you get more energy out than is put into creating the device is never explained, though a mostly physics compliant answer would be that you chuck a bunch of mass into the black hole on creation, which rips it apart into energy that then fuels the creation of the subspace dimension and can be retrieved for later use.
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If this memory problem is still a thing, a stop-gap measure would be to start writing on Google Docs - it autosaves your work, so you wouldn't lose as much when the computer crashes. It also saves to cloud storage, so you could work on the same document on other devices if you decided to send your PC in to the manufacturer to get it repaired.
Chapter 9: You're a Wizard, Harry
- Location
- Maryland
Chapter 9: You're a Wizard, Harry
Ellen Ripley was sitting in the dining area of the Ship of Fools with a hot mug of coffee and a bowl of hot oatmeal. She hadn't said much as of yet. Harry, Taylor and Xander were keeping her company. Miles and Daniel had gone back to the bridge to try and figure out where they were. Peter and Jimmy had volunteered to clean up the cargo bay and strap the cryopod down somewhere out of the way. Ripley took another bite of oatmeal, and asked, "What happened to the Sulaco?"
"Daniel said there appeared to be a fire onboard. We arrived on the scene just as your pod was ejected...I'm guessing by some kind of fail-safe?" said Xander.
Ripley nodded her head, and replied, "They're designed to do that in the event of an emergency that threatens the integrity of the ship. What happened to the other pods?"
"Yours was the only one that ejected," said Taylor from the other side of the dining table.
Ripley looked up at Taylor. "There were four occupied pods on that ship. Me, Corporal Hicks, the unit's android, Bishop, and the only surviving colonist, Rebecca Jordan. We have to go back if their pods didn't eject..." Ripley began to get up from the table.
"Ripley," said Xander, "there was only one life sign on board when we got there. That was you."
Ripley sat back down and stared into her coffee mug. "Rebecca Jordan was only six years old."
Xander lowered his eyes to look at the table, and just said, "I'm sorry."
The four of them sat in silence for a couple of minutes. Then Harry asked, "What did you mean when you said she was the only surviving colonist? What happened to the rest of the colony?"
Ripley looked at Harry, momentarily distracted from her grief. "You mean you're not part of a rescue mission? The Marines didn't send you, or Weyland-Yutani?"
"No, we just happened to detect your ship while we were passing nearby," explained Xander.
Ripley stared at Xander. "That seems rather unlikely," she said. The likelihood of accidentally running across another vessel in space was exceedingly small.
Taylor replied, "It's part of a rather long and strange story filled with unlikely coincidences. I lived through parts of it, and I find it hard to believe."
"Honestly," said Harry, "parts of it you're probably not going to believe without proof. You're likely to think we're a bunch of crazies."
Ripley sat for a second in thought. "Regardless, I need to get in touch with somebody in the military or the government. They need to know what happened to the Hadley's Hope colony."
Xanded replied, "Daniel and Miles are figuring out our position and heading on the bridge as we speak. What happened to the colony that has you so freaked?"
"The Sulaco was a military transport. It was sent with a platoon of Colonial Marines to investigate why the colony had fallen silent. I was on board as a civilian consultant. Hadley's Hope was a terraforming colony on the planet LV-426. On that planet is a crashed alien ship filled with large eggs. The eggs hatch and the creature inside looks for a host to implant. After implantation, the host seems normal for a short time, but they die when the alien lifeform inside bursts out." Ripley paused for a breath.
"Back in 2122, I was a Warrant Officer on a commercial hauler, the Nostromo, that stopped on LV-426. Our XO, Kane, was implanted and died when the xenomorph burst from his chest. In less than twenty-four hours, the other four remaining crew members were killed off one-by-one. The creature was intelligent, good at staying unseen, was extremely fast, had claws, teeth, and a barbed tail, and had acid for blood which tended to spray when it was injured. I managed to blow it out an airlock, but in the process the Nostromo was destroyed, and I was stuck in cold sleep on a shuttle for 57 years, during which time the colony was founded," explained Ripley.
"They founded the colony not knowing about the danger on the alien ship, then?" asked Taylor.
Ripley's face turned angry. "No, somebody knew. My crew on the Nostromo were awakened from cold sleep and sent down to that planet. The android on our ship, Ash, had secret orders to retrieve a sample of that creature no matter the cost. The crew was considered expendable. When I got back to Earth, the whole thing had been white-washed. I was given a psych discharge and had my flight license revoked. The colony was founded after the Nostromo disappeared, and the colonists were ordered to investigate that same ship. Burke, the company rep sent with us on the Sulaco, had sent them out there deliberately so that the company would have a sample for their bio-weapons division. He later tried to get aliens to implant me and Newt so he could smuggle the creature through quarantine."
"Newt?" asked Xander.
The anger on Ellen Ripley's face changed back to sadness. "It's what we called Rebecca. She was traumatized by her experiences and wouldn't talk at first. Newt was what her brother called her." With a look of determination, she added, "We have to let somebody know what Burke and the others at Weyland-Yutani were trying to do. If those creatures got loose on Earth, it could be the end of everything."
"Let's head to the bridge and see where we stand," suggested Harry. They were going to have a problem letting the authorities know what had happened to Ellen, as they had jumped to an entirely different universe while rescuing her.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The bridge was crowded. Peter and Jimmy had come up after finishing up in the cargo hold, and the four from the galley had just arrived.
"We have some good news," said Daniel. "According to our star readings, we're not that far from Earth. It's only about a ten day journey at warp 2."
From near the doorway, Ellen said, "Ten days? How is that possible? LV-426 was 39 light years from Earth."
"You were actually about 19 light years from Earth when we encountered the Sulaco," said O'Brien. "Regardless, we're now only about a quarter of a light year out."
"That doesn't make any sense...even a fast courier couldn't make it back to Earth so quickly from where you picked me up," proclaimed Ripley, "and even if you could, it wouldn't take ten days to then go the remaining quarter light year!"
Daniel looked at Harry questioningly. "You didn't tell her?" he asked.
Harry looked sheepish as he explained, "We hadn't gotten to it yet."
"Tell me what?" said Ellen slightly menacingly.
Daniel raised his hands placatingly and explained, "Our ship doesn't use the same kind of propulsion as the ones you're used to using."
"How did the Sulaco go faster than light?" asked O'Brien.
She frowned, and replied, "It uses a hyperdrive tachyon shunt. A quarter-lightyear would have taken less than a day's travel."
"The Ship of Fools actually has two drive systems..." O'Brien started to explain.
"Wait," interrupted Ripley. "Your ship is named the Ship of Fools?"
Slightly impatiently, Miles waved that away, and said, "We'll explain the name later. Anyway, we have two drive systems. One is a wormhole drive that provides for instantaneous transit, but it's extremely imprecise. The second drive is much slower. It works by warping space to go faster than light. Unfortunately, our version is jury-rigged from another ship that crashed, and so we can only go about ten times c."
Ripley looked disbelievingly at O'Brien. "I've been in space most of my life, and I've never heard of space drives like you're describing."
"Well," said Daniel hesitatingly, "when we say that the wormhole drive is imprecise, what we really mean is that when we use it...we kind of tear through the boundaries between parallel universes and end up in an entirely different reality than we started." Daniel was visibly wincing as he said the last part.
Ellen Ripley looked several times back and forth between Miles and Daniel before loudly saying, "You expect me to believe that PILE OF BULLSHIT? What the hell is really going on here? Are you people running from the authorities or something?"
"I told you she'd think we were crazy..." said Dresden quietly from the back of the room.
Jimmy spoke up before the conversation could degenerate further. "Look, we've got some time before we can get back to Earth. Just show her the drive systems and explain how they work. If she was an officer on a starship, I'm sure she can tell if she's looking at a real drive system, even if it isn't one she's seen before."
"Yes, I absolutely can tell the difference between a real and a fake," said Ellen harshly.
With little choice in the matter, Daniel and Miles proceeded to take her to the engine room and point out the various pieces of the drive systems. She didn't really start to believe them until she personally took readings of the output from the zero-point-energy power plant. Over the next few days, she spent quite a lot of time quizzing them about the theory and practice behind the drives. Ellen was impressed with Chief O'Brien's knowledge of warp theory and practice. She was less impressed with the apparently massive gaps in knowledge that Daniel seemed to have with regard to the wormhole drive. The whole interaction made Jackson uncomfortable, but Ripley grudgingly accepted the necessity of their situation once she heard the whole story.
She was less sanguine when she found out Taylor and Peter had superpowers, and simply refused to believe Harry was a wizard until he spent the better part of an hour demonstrating his magic. By the time they arrived at Earth, though, she was fully up to speed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Harry Dresden was carving runes into the end of his new staff. The piece of aged oak had been sitting on top of the ruins of one of the nicer houses in Sunnydale. Xander had said it was the home of a girl with the unlikely name of Aphrodesia. Harry just chalked that up to being California. Luckily for him, the girl's parents had had better taste in building materials than in baby names. There were markings on the end of the oak beam that indicated it was from old growth oak in Ireland. The wood itself was fine-grained and quite beautiful once polished. Once the runes were carved, he would have to put it through another cleansing ritual. Using a staff made of wood that had been sitting on top of a Hellmouth for years wouldn't be wise without purging it of any evil influence. He had to use salvaged supplies from Sunnydale for the rituals. Interestingly, replicated materials seemed to lack any of the symbolic meaning so important for magic. He had made a note to look at them from an alchemical perspective if he ever got a chance, although alchemy had never been his strong suit.
He paused his work when somebody knocked on the hatch to his room. "Come on in!" he yelled. Xander had warned him how Sunnydale vampires could cross a threshold with something as simple as a welcome mat. Harry figured if there was a vampire on board the Ship of Fools, then everybody on board had bigger problems than access.
Ellen Ripley climbed down the short ladder into the room. She was still wearing the earth-tone jumpsuit replicated by O'Brien. Starfleet seemed to default to earth tones for clothing, like they were caught in the 70's. "I'm not interrupting anything important, am I?" she asked.
"I'm not doing anything that will explode, summon a demon, or turn you into an frog if it's interrupted," he answered.
"Are those common problems for you?" she asked with a quizzical look.
He thought for a second. "Not as often as you'd think, but more often than I'd like. What can I do for you?"
"I just wanted to apologize for putting you through the wringer earlier," she said. "I think I was having serious issues with my situation and was being too stubborn. I appreciate your patience." She had forced him to use enough minor magic to tire him out in order to prove his claims.
He waved his hand. "It's not a problem. I've met a lot of folks who don't believe in magic. It's really my own fault for advertising as a wizard in the Yellow Pages."
"Yellow Pages?" she asked with a confused look.
"It's a telephone directory," he explained. He should have expected a woman from the 22nd century wouldn't know what a phone book was. They were already phasing them out in Harry's time.
"So who's minding your business while you're off wandering around the multiverse?" she asked.
Harry's smile faded a bit. "Just before I ended up stuck out here, somebody blew up my office."
"Oh my God, I'm sorry," said Ellen. "Do you know who did it?"
"Yes," he answered, "and I made sure they won't be doing it to anybody else."
Ripley sat down on a stool that doubled as an end table. "Was somebody trying to kill you?"
"I'm sure they would have been happy if I had been caught, but they were sending a message. They also firebombed my apartment and destroyed my car," he explained. "I was caught up in a war between the council of wizards and one of the vampire courts."
Ellen got an odd look on her face. "That still sounds like something from a fantasy story to me, I'm afraid. How did you get caught up in the middle of it?"
Harry hesitated. "I actually started it. I violated a truce in order to save the life of a woman I cared for. The war didn't go well for my side."
"You saved her life, though?" Ripley asked.
"I did...but she died at the end of the war, right before I ended up trapped with Jimmy and Xander in the ruins of Sunnydale," he answered.
Ripley looked down at the floor. "My trip on the Nostromo was going to be my last trip before I took leave to spend more time with my daughter. It was supposed to be twenty months round trip. Instead, I spent more than fifty years floating through space in cold sleep. By the time I got back to Earth, my daughter had died." There were tears in her eyes as she recounted her biggest regret.
Harry put a hand on her arm in sympathy, and sighed. "Right before my life blew up, Susan showed up at my home and let me know that we had a daughter. She hadn't told me she was pregnant when she left."
"Well, now you have a chance to get to know her at least, right?" asked Ellen. "I mean, assuming we get everyone home soon."
"I'm worried about her. I have enemies that would go after her just to spite me. The plan was that she would live with some friends of mine who have children." Ellen gave him a disbelieving look, so he explained further. "You HAVE to understand, my enemies wouldn't just kill her. They would destroy her mind and her soul, and do it with a song in their heart."
"Her soul?" asked Ellen.
"One of my enemies is the leader of a group called the Order of the Blackened Denarius. The Denarians are called that because each one has a silver coin, one of the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot. Possessing the coin joins the holder with the soul of a Fallen Angel. Their leader, Nicodemus Archleone, has had that position for two thousand years. He hates me because I'm one of the only people who knows how to actually kill him. The first time I ran into them, they tortured a Knight of the Cross to death and tried to release a virulent plague in downtown Chicago. Every single one of them is a psychopath with tremendous power, and they're almost impossible to kill."
"Your world is very different from mine," said Ripley. "I don't know if I could deal with supernatural horrors like that. It's hard enough dealing with mundane greed and stupidity."
"I find that hard to believe. From what you've said, you've survived many encounters with these xenomorphs. Frankly, they sound as frightening as many of the worst monsters of faerie in my world." Dresden had a sneaking suspicion that he had seen one before. One of the phobophages at SplatterCon sounded an awful lot like the monsters Ellen Ripley had described.
"Maybe you're right," she answered, "but let me give you some advice. Not spending enough time with my daughter is the one thing I regret the most in my life. I should have made more time for Amanda. What's your daughter's name?"
"Margaret...Maggie. I left her with a friend of mine, Father Forthill, right before I was attacked and ended up here," said Dresden.
She put her hand on Harry's, and told him, "Do what you can to be a part of her life. Letting her have her father in her life is worth the risk."
With that, Ripley left Dresden's cabin. Harry spent quite a long time thinking after she left.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The entire crew was present on the bridge for their arrival at Earth as the ship passed the orbit of Venus. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief as they saw the familiar vista of continents and oceans. Even Miles, who lived where Starfleet posted him, and Ellen, who was born on Luna, considered Earth to be the cradle of humanity.
Miles was reviewing the sensors. "This is weird," he said. "I'm not picking up any signs of orbital infrastructure. There aren't even any artificial satellites, never mind stations or spacedocks. There should be something above any of our versions of Earth."
There was a moment of silence as everybody absorbed that fact.
Ripley was the first to speak, albeit quietly. "This really is another universe, isn't it? If we were at my Earth, we would be seeing satellites, Gateway station...this is really real..."
Miles continued reading out the sensor results. "There are no signs of industrial pollution in the atmosphere. There are signs of cities and road networks, though. The Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Giza are all visible."
"That only dates it as sometime after the 3rd century BC," said Daniel. "Are there any Naquadah signatures?" The presence of the heavy element would suggest they were in Daniel's universe, even if it was in the past.
"I'm not seeing any signs of advanced heavy elements," said O'Brien. "I'm also not seeing any signs of advanced energy sources. It looks like a low-tech civilization without any aliens, time travelers or precursor civilizations."
Daniel activated the zoom feature, homing in on Western Europe which was in daylight. "Give me a little bit of time to look over the landscape, and I can probably narrow down what historical period we're in right now," he explained.
"Why?" asked Taylor. "I mean, this isn't our Earth, unless we somehow traveled into the past."
"...and if we did," added Xander, "I don't really want to risk landing and accidentally killing my own grandfather."
Daniel looked a little disappointed, and said, "I just thought it was interesting."
"Can they see us?" asked Jimmy. "Wouldn't showing them a spaceship in orbit kind of risk changing the past?"
Miles shook his head. "We're not in close orbit. The only way they could see us would be to point a telescope right at us, which is really unlikely."
"Can we plot a course that avoids putting us between Earth and any of the other points of interest in the system?" asked Jimmy.
"I can do that, and that's not a bad idea," agreed Miles.
Slightly disappointed, the rest of the crew went off to continue whatever they were doing as Daniel eagerly scanned the surface looking for clues, and Miles took care of their course.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"We are agreed, then?" asked the man seated at the head of the table. He was wearing a tunic marked with a house crest, a lion rampant on a yellow and red field, on top of black hose. Continuing, he said, "We need to found an institute of learning, someplace safe from the church and the machinations of kings."
Around the table sat two women and man, each of which wore rich robes made with expensive fabrics. "I think we've made that clear, Godric. The question now is where to build it," said the woman in silver robes. "We need to find a place where the natural ley lines converge. That will make construction much easier."
"What about London?" asked the other woman. "Diagon Alley is set on a convergence of ley lines. That would make it easy for students to reach, as well."
"London is also the seat of the church in England, and filled to bursting with mundanes, Helga," said the man in the green-boardered robe. "It's the opposite of what we want in a sanctuary."
"I agree that London isn't suitable. How about Sarum? That's close to several druidic sites," stated the woman in silver.
As the debate grew more vigorous, Godric sighed. The four were good friends, but highly uneven in temperament. He had a sneaking suspicion this debate would last past this evening. He thought idly that it might be worth opening a cask of wine before things grew acrimonious.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Ellen Ripley had dragged both Miles and Daniel to the engine room, much to Daniel's chagrin, as he was making progress on his assessment. He was sure now that this was subsequent to the fall of the western Roman Empire, and Chichen Itza was a thriving settlement. That narrowed things down quite a bit. Ellen was fairly insistent, though.
She turned to address the two of them. "We need to better understand how this wormhole drive works. There could be an infinite number of universes out there. There has to be a way to determine where we end up when we activate it."
Daniel winced a bit. "We have looked at it, but the mathematics encoded in the drive system are exceedingly complicated. I don't have a complete memory of how it operates, but I do recall that altering the parameters without understanding things can have extremely bad results, bad enough that it was forbidden by the governing body of the Ancients."
Miles said, "I think I have to agree with Ellen on this one. We're not going to make any progress toward getting home without deciphering how it works."
Grudgingly, Daniel agreed. Internally, he felt irrational guilt over not having the answers. He was sure he could have explained it to them back when he was still ascended. Of course, he wouldn't have been allowed to explain it to them. Most of the flashes of insight he had were more along the lines of how Peter described his danger sense -- warnings of what was safe and what was not.
It took them three weeks of constant analysis before they made a kind of breakthrough when they realized that the drive actually created more than one wormhole. Prior to transit, it would open a handful of micro-wormholes in an attempt to verify a safe path. Daniel knew from personal experience that bad things could happen if a wormhole passed through a solar flare, for example. By looking at how the mathematics varied for the micro-wormholes, they were able to isolate the portions that were focused on spatial coordinates. By comparing the logs of past transits, they were then able to isolate the segments specifying the quantum signature of the target reality. It was a little unclear how they could translate Starfleet's quantum signature readings into targets for the Ancient drive, unfortunately. The first positive result, though, was that they determined that they could use the wormhole drive to move through space without hopping dimensions. That would make things much easier for traveling in realspace, as their limited warp drive was quite slow compared to what all of the space-farers in the crew knew from their personal experience.
Their initial test of the wormhole drive without changing realities accidentally dropped them in a low orbit over Scotland, much to their concern.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The four horses made their way over the Scottish moors, looking for signs of anything unusual. The weather was rather damp and foggy.
"Godric, are we going to ride across the breadth of the Kingdom?" asked the other male rider.
Godric favored him with a cool stare. "Sal, you know why we're here. Those reports of lights in the sky in Scotland coincided with that feeling that we all had last month."
One of the women, Rowena, added her thoughts. "We have to investigate. Somebody could be working a major ritual, and none of the light wizards and witches knew of anything happening this far north."
Salazar knew they were right, but by Merlin, he hated the damp. Scotland made him cranky.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
With more test runs conducted outside lunar orbit, the crew were confident that they could use the drive for translocation within the same dimension. They only attempted one transit that fiddled with a segment of the math that Daniel warned against. That test had shifted them fifteen days into the future, and all of their subsequent tests were exceedingly careful to avoid changing those parameters. With increasing confidence, they ran a test that dropped them within 500 meters of the surface of the dark side of the moon. As a native of her universe's Luna, Ripley found the barren landscape of the undeveloped satellite both beautiful and disquieting. They also tested it over interstellar distances, dropping down into the trinary Alpha Centauri system. That time, it was Miles who found the empty system a unique experience. The final test was to verify that they could teleport within an atmosphere. They debated trying Mars or Venus, but the three from universes with superpowers, Peter, Taylor and Jimmy, argued that they needed some way to get from space to the ground on Earth. The Ship of Fools had no teleporters and no shuttles. While there were obvious docking points for shuttles, the craft had been long gone before they had found the ship. The derelict where they had found Peter and Taylor had also been completely bereft of small craft, giving them little option but to land the ship if they wanted to debark.
After some debate, they decided to try and open a wormhole deep in the wilds of Scotland. It was sparsely populated, and they could hopefully keep their impact limited to the same geographic area as their earlier accidental flyover.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The four wizards and witches were awakened by a loud roaring noise and a disquieting feeling, similar but more powerful than the one that had prompted their search. From their camp, they could see bright light of a kind that indicated advanced sorcery. The four packed up camp, and hurried over to the location of the disruption. When they arrived, the air was still tingling, as if something had opened a hole in the magical field nearby.
"Do you feel that?" asked Rowena. "There's a lot of power concentrated here. There must be at least two, possibly more, ley lines running into convergence here. I don't think this place has been discovered, possibly not even by the druids."
Sal looked around the site. "This would be a good site for a fortification. It's naturally defensible, and there's a good site for a village nearby. The rise gives you a good view over all of the approaches."
Helga pointed off toward a nearby lake. "There's freshwater here, and that lake would be a perfect home for magical creatures. The soil seems good for Scotland, too."
Godric was more concerned about whatever it was that had brought them here. There was no sign that anybody had been here, but he was sure that something had been here in the early morning. "We still don't know what caused that disturbance that woke us from our sleep. Whatever it was may come back."
Suddenly, there was a flash of fire that startled the four. In the midst of them, a phoenix appeared. It flew over to Godric and hovered for a moment before settling on the large man's shoulder. For a moment, the four just stared in stunned silence.
Godric broke the silence. "Well, hello there, friend. What can we do for you?" They all recognized the phoenix as a creature of obvious goodness and light. When the bird began to sing, the sound made them relax from their state of alertness. Godric listened for a moment, and said, "She says this site is safe, and that it's what we've been seeking for our school. Hm."
"Well, I guess that's settled then. It would be hard to get a better endorsement than that of a phoenix. I guess the only question now is what we call it," said Helga.
That started another debate that lasted until it was time to make camp again.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"All right, based on our jump into Ellen's reality, we've come up with what we think might be able to get us back there with the drive," explained Miles.
"Why can't we just duplicate the jump that got us there?" asked Xander reasonably.
"It's not quite that simple," said Ripley. "The math changes based upon your point of origin. It's not so much like dialing a phone number as it is going to an offset from your current location."
"The Stargate network in my universe worked in a similar way. We had addresses for other worlds, but we had to adjust them for spatial drift on our own because our Gate had been disconnected from the network for thousands of years and hadn't been updated with the new stellar positions," added Daniel.
With that, everybody agreed that with their next jump, they would try to get Ellen Ripley back to her own universe.
Ellen Ripley was sitting in the dining area of the Ship of Fools with a hot mug of coffee and a bowl of hot oatmeal. She hadn't said much as of yet. Harry, Taylor and Xander were keeping her company. Miles and Daniel had gone back to the bridge to try and figure out where they were. Peter and Jimmy had volunteered to clean up the cargo bay and strap the cryopod down somewhere out of the way. Ripley took another bite of oatmeal, and asked, "What happened to the Sulaco?"
"Daniel said there appeared to be a fire onboard. We arrived on the scene just as your pod was ejected...I'm guessing by some kind of fail-safe?" said Xander.
Ripley nodded her head, and replied, "They're designed to do that in the event of an emergency that threatens the integrity of the ship. What happened to the other pods?"
"Yours was the only one that ejected," said Taylor from the other side of the dining table.
Ripley looked up at Taylor. "There were four occupied pods on that ship. Me, Corporal Hicks, the unit's android, Bishop, and the only surviving colonist, Rebecca Jordan. We have to go back if their pods didn't eject..." Ripley began to get up from the table.
"Ripley," said Xander, "there was only one life sign on board when we got there. That was you."
Ripley sat back down and stared into her coffee mug. "Rebecca Jordan was only six years old."
Xander lowered his eyes to look at the table, and just said, "I'm sorry."
The four of them sat in silence for a couple of minutes. Then Harry asked, "What did you mean when you said she was the only surviving colonist? What happened to the rest of the colony?"
Ripley looked at Harry, momentarily distracted from her grief. "You mean you're not part of a rescue mission? The Marines didn't send you, or Weyland-Yutani?"
"No, we just happened to detect your ship while we were passing nearby," explained Xander.
Ripley stared at Xander. "That seems rather unlikely," she said. The likelihood of accidentally running across another vessel in space was exceedingly small.
Taylor replied, "It's part of a rather long and strange story filled with unlikely coincidences. I lived through parts of it, and I find it hard to believe."
"Honestly," said Harry, "parts of it you're probably not going to believe without proof. You're likely to think we're a bunch of crazies."
Ripley sat for a second in thought. "Regardless, I need to get in touch with somebody in the military or the government. They need to know what happened to the Hadley's Hope colony."
Xanded replied, "Daniel and Miles are figuring out our position and heading on the bridge as we speak. What happened to the colony that has you so freaked?"
"The Sulaco was a military transport. It was sent with a platoon of Colonial Marines to investigate why the colony had fallen silent. I was on board as a civilian consultant. Hadley's Hope was a terraforming colony on the planet LV-426. On that planet is a crashed alien ship filled with large eggs. The eggs hatch and the creature inside looks for a host to implant. After implantation, the host seems normal for a short time, but they die when the alien lifeform inside bursts out." Ripley paused for a breath.
"Back in 2122, I was a Warrant Officer on a commercial hauler, the Nostromo, that stopped on LV-426. Our XO, Kane, was implanted and died when the xenomorph burst from his chest. In less than twenty-four hours, the other four remaining crew members were killed off one-by-one. The creature was intelligent, good at staying unseen, was extremely fast, had claws, teeth, and a barbed tail, and had acid for blood which tended to spray when it was injured. I managed to blow it out an airlock, but in the process the Nostromo was destroyed, and I was stuck in cold sleep on a shuttle for 57 years, during which time the colony was founded," explained Ripley.
"They founded the colony not knowing about the danger on the alien ship, then?" asked Taylor.
Ripley's face turned angry. "No, somebody knew. My crew on the Nostromo were awakened from cold sleep and sent down to that planet. The android on our ship, Ash, had secret orders to retrieve a sample of that creature no matter the cost. The crew was considered expendable. When I got back to Earth, the whole thing had been white-washed. I was given a psych discharge and had my flight license revoked. The colony was founded after the Nostromo disappeared, and the colonists were ordered to investigate that same ship. Burke, the company rep sent with us on the Sulaco, had sent them out there deliberately so that the company would have a sample for their bio-weapons division. He later tried to get aliens to implant me and Newt so he could smuggle the creature through quarantine."
"Newt?" asked Xander.
The anger on Ellen Ripley's face changed back to sadness. "It's what we called Rebecca. She was traumatized by her experiences and wouldn't talk at first. Newt was what her brother called her." With a look of determination, she added, "We have to let somebody know what Burke and the others at Weyland-Yutani were trying to do. If those creatures got loose on Earth, it could be the end of everything."
"Let's head to the bridge and see where we stand," suggested Harry. They were going to have a problem letting the authorities know what had happened to Ellen, as they had jumped to an entirely different universe while rescuing her.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The bridge was crowded. Peter and Jimmy had come up after finishing up in the cargo hold, and the four from the galley had just arrived.
"We have some good news," said Daniel. "According to our star readings, we're not that far from Earth. It's only about a ten day journey at warp 2."
From near the doorway, Ellen said, "Ten days? How is that possible? LV-426 was 39 light years from Earth."
"You were actually about 19 light years from Earth when we encountered the Sulaco," said O'Brien. "Regardless, we're now only about a quarter of a light year out."
"That doesn't make any sense...even a fast courier couldn't make it back to Earth so quickly from where you picked me up," proclaimed Ripley, "and even if you could, it wouldn't take ten days to then go the remaining quarter light year!"
Daniel looked at Harry questioningly. "You didn't tell her?" he asked.
Harry looked sheepish as he explained, "We hadn't gotten to it yet."
"Tell me what?" said Ellen slightly menacingly.
Daniel raised his hands placatingly and explained, "Our ship doesn't use the same kind of propulsion as the ones you're used to using."
"How did the Sulaco go faster than light?" asked O'Brien.
She frowned, and replied, "It uses a hyperdrive tachyon shunt. A quarter-lightyear would have taken less than a day's travel."
"The Ship of Fools actually has two drive systems..." O'Brien started to explain.
"Wait," interrupted Ripley. "Your ship is named the Ship of Fools?"
Slightly impatiently, Miles waved that away, and said, "We'll explain the name later. Anyway, we have two drive systems. One is a wormhole drive that provides for instantaneous transit, but it's extremely imprecise. The second drive is much slower. It works by warping space to go faster than light. Unfortunately, our version is jury-rigged from another ship that crashed, and so we can only go about ten times c."
Ripley looked disbelievingly at O'Brien. "I've been in space most of my life, and I've never heard of space drives like you're describing."
"Well," said Daniel hesitatingly, "when we say that the wormhole drive is imprecise, what we really mean is that when we use it...we kind of tear through the boundaries between parallel universes and end up in an entirely different reality than we started." Daniel was visibly wincing as he said the last part.
Ellen Ripley looked several times back and forth between Miles and Daniel before loudly saying, "You expect me to believe that PILE OF BULLSHIT? What the hell is really going on here? Are you people running from the authorities or something?"
"I told you she'd think we were crazy..." said Dresden quietly from the back of the room.
Jimmy spoke up before the conversation could degenerate further. "Look, we've got some time before we can get back to Earth. Just show her the drive systems and explain how they work. If she was an officer on a starship, I'm sure she can tell if she's looking at a real drive system, even if it isn't one she's seen before."
"Yes, I absolutely can tell the difference between a real and a fake," said Ellen harshly.
With little choice in the matter, Daniel and Miles proceeded to take her to the engine room and point out the various pieces of the drive systems. She didn't really start to believe them until she personally took readings of the output from the zero-point-energy power plant. Over the next few days, she spent quite a lot of time quizzing them about the theory and practice behind the drives. Ellen was impressed with Chief O'Brien's knowledge of warp theory and practice. She was less impressed with the apparently massive gaps in knowledge that Daniel seemed to have with regard to the wormhole drive. The whole interaction made Jackson uncomfortable, but Ripley grudgingly accepted the necessity of their situation once she heard the whole story.
She was less sanguine when she found out Taylor and Peter had superpowers, and simply refused to believe Harry was a wizard until he spent the better part of an hour demonstrating his magic. By the time they arrived at Earth, though, she was fully up to speed.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Harry Dresden was carving runes into the end of his new staff. The piece of aged oak had been sitting on top of the ruins of one of the nicer houses in Sunnydale. Xander had said it was the home of a girl with the unlikely name of Aphrodesia. Harry just chalked that up to being California. Luckily for him, the girl's parents had had better taste in building materials than in baby names. There were markings on the end of the oak beam that indicated it was from old growth oak in Ireland. The wood itself was fine-grained and quite beautiful once polished. Once the runes were carved, he would have to put it through another cleansing ritual. Using a staff made of wood that had been sitting on top of a Hellmouth for years wouldn't be wise without purging it of any evil influence. He had to use salvaged supplies from Sunnydale for the rituals. Interestingly, replicated materials seemed to lack any of the symbolic meaning so important for magic. He had made a note to look at them from an alchemical perspective if he ever got a chance, although alchemy had never been his strong suit.
He paused his work when somebody knocked on the hatch to his room. "Come on in!" he yelled. Xander had warned him how Sunnydale vampires could cross a threshold with something as simple as a welcome mat. Harry figured if there was a vampire on board the Ship of Fools, then everybody on board had bigger problems than access.
Ellen Ripley climbed down the short ladder into the room. She was still wearing the earth-tone jumpsuit replicated by O'Brien. Starfleet seemed to default to earth tones for clothing, like they were caught in the 70's. "I'm not interrupting anything important, am I?" she asked.
"I'm not doing anything that will explode, summon a demon, or turn you into an frog if it's interrupted," he answered.
"Are those common problems for you?" she asked with a quizzical look.
He thought for a second. "Not as often as you'd think, but more often than I'd like. What can I do for you?"
"I just wanted to apologize for putting you through the wringer earlier," she said. "I think I was having serious issues with my situation and was being too stubborn. I appreciate your patience." She had forced him to use enough minor magic to tire him out in order to prove his claims.
He waved his hand. "It's not a problem. I've met a lot of folks who don't believe in magic. It's really my own fault for advertising as a wizard in the Yellow Pages."
"Yellow Pages?" she asked with a confused look.
"It's a telephone directory," he explained. He should have expected a woman from the 22nd century wouldn't know what a phone book was. They were already phasing them out in Harry's time.
"So who's minding your business while you're off wandering around the multiverse?" she asked.
Harry's smile faded a bit. "Just before I ended up stuck out here, somebody blew up my office."
"Oh my God, I'm sorry," said Ellen. "Do you know who did it?"
"Yes," he answered, "and I made sure they won't be doing it to anybody else."
Ripley sat down on a stool that doubled as an end table. "Was somebody trying to kill you?"
"I'm sure they would have been happy if I had been caught, but they were sending a message. They also firebombed my apartment and destroyed my car," he explained. "I was caught up in a war between the council of wizards and one of the vampire courts."
Ellen got an odd look on her face. "That still sounds like something from a fantasy story to me, I'm afraid. How did you get caught up in the middle of it?"
Harry hesitated. "I actually started it. I violated a truce in order to save the life of a woman I cared for. The war didn't go well for my side."
"You saved her life, though?" Ripley asked.
"I did...but she died at the end of the war, right before I ended up trapped with Jimmy and Xander in the ruins of Sunnydale," he answered.
Ripley looked down at the floor. "My trip on the Nostromo was going to be my last trip before I took leave to spend more time with my daughter. It was supposed to be twenty months round trip. Instead, I spent more than fifty years floating through space in cold sleep. By the time I got back to Earth, my daughter had died." There were tears in her eyes as she recounted her biggest regret.
Harry put a hand on her arm in sympathy, and sighed. "Right before my life blew up, Susan showed up at my home and let me know that we had a daughter. She hadn't told me she was pregnant when she left."
"Well, now you have a chance to get to know her at least, right?" asked Ellen. "I mean, assuming we get everyone home soon."
"I'm worried about her. I have enemies that would go after her just to spite me. The plan was that she would live with some friends of mine who have children." Ellen gave him a disbelieving look, so he explained further. "You HAVE to understand, my enemies wouldn't just kill her. They would destroy her mind and her soul, and do it with a song in their heart."
"Her soul?" asked Ellen.
"One of my enemies is the leader of a group called the Order of the Blackened Denarius. The Denarians are called that because each one has a silver coin, one of the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot. Possessing the coin joins the holder with the soul of a Fallen Angel. Their leader, Nicodemus Archleone, has had that position for two thousand years. He hates me because I'm one of the only people who knows how to actually kill him. The first time I ran into them, they tortured a Knight of the Cross to death and tried to release a virulent plague in downtown Chicago. Every single one of them is a psychopath with tremendous power, and they're almost impossible to kill."
"Your world is very different from mine," said Ripley. "I don't know if I could deal with supernatural horrors like that. It's hard enough dealing with mundane greed and stupidity."
"I find that hard to believe. From what you've said, you've survived many encounters with these xenomorphs. Frankly, they sound as frightening as many of the worst monsters of faerie in my world." Dresden had a sneaking suspicion that he had seen one before. One of the phobophages at SplatterCon sounded an awful lot like the monsters Ellen Ripley had described.
"Maybe you're right," she answered, "but let me give you some advice. Not spending enough time with my daughter is the one thing I regret the most in my life. I should have made more time for Amanda. What's your daughter's name?"
"Margaret...Maggie. I left her with a friend of mine, Father Forthill, right before I was attacked and ended up here," said Dresden.
She put her hand on Harry's, and told him, "Do what you can to be a part of her life. Letting her have her father in her life is worth the risk."
With that, Ripley left Dresden's cabin. Harry spent quite a long time thinking after she left.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The entire crew was present on the bridge for their arrival at Earth as the ship passed the orbit of Venus. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief as they saw the familiar vista of continents and oceans. Even Miles, who lived where Starfleet posted him, and Ellen, who was born on Luna, considered Earth to be the cradle of humanity.
Miles was reviewing the sensors. "This is weird," he said. "I'm not picking up any signs of orbital infrastructure. There aren't even any artificial satellites, never mind stations or spacedocks. There should be something above any of our versions of Earth."
There was a moment of silence as everybody absorbed that fact.
Ripley was the first to speak, albeit quietly. "This really is another universe, isn't it? If we were at my Earth, we would be seeing satellites, Gateway station...this is really real..."
Miles continued reading out the sensor results. "There are no signs of industrial pollution in the atmosphere. There are signs of cities and road networks, though. The Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Giza are all visible."
"That only dates it as sometime after the 3rd century BC," said Daniel. "Are there any Naquadah signatures?" The presence of the heavy element would suggest they were in Daniel's universe, even if it was in the past.
"I'm not seeing any signs of advanced heavy elements," said O'Brien. "I'm also not seeing any signs of advanced energy sources. It looks like a low-tech civilization without any aliens, time travelers or precursor civilizations."
Daniel activated the zoom feature, homing in on Western Europe which was in daylight. "Give me a little bit of time to look over the landscape, and I can probably narrow down what historical period we're in right now," he explained.
"Why?" asked Taylor. "I mean, this isn't our Earth, unless we somehow traveled into the past."
"...and if we did," added Xander, "I don't really want to risk landing and accidentally killing my own grandfather."
Daniel looked a little disappointed, and said, "I just thought it was interesting."
"Can they see us?" asked Jimmy. "Wouldn't showing them a spaceship in orbit kind of risk changing the past?"
Miles shook his head. "We're not in close orbit. The only way they could see us would be to point a telescope right at us, which is really unlikely."
"Can we plot a course that avoids putting us between Earth and any of the other points of interest in the system?" asked Jimmy.
"I can do that, and that's not a bad idea," agreed Miles.
Slightly disappointed, the rest of the crew went off to continue whatever they were doing as Daniel eagerly scanned the surface looking for clues, and Miles took care of their course.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"We are agreed, then?" asked the man seated at the head of the table. He was wearing a tunic marked with a house crest, a lion rampant on a yellow and red field, on top of black hose. Continuing, he said, "We need to found an institute of learning, someplace safe from the church and the machinations of kings."
Around the table sat two women and man, each of which wore rich robes made with expensive fabrics. "I think we've made that clear, Godric. The question now is where to build it," said the woman in silver robes. "We need to find a place where the natural ley lines converge. That will make construction much easier."
"What about London?" asked the other woman. "Diagon Alley is set on a convergence of ley lines. That would make it easy for students to reach, as well."
"London is also the seat of the church in England, and filled to bursting with mundanes, Helga," said the man in the green-boardered robe. "It's the opposite of what we want in a sanctuary."
"I agree that London isn't suitable. How about Sarum? That's close to several druidic sites," stated the woman in silver.
As the debate grew more vigorous, Godric sighed. The four were good friends, but highly uneven in temperament. He had a sneaking suspicion this debate would last past this evening. He thought idly that it might be worth opening a cask of wine before things grew acrimonious.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Ellen Ripley had dragged both Miles and Daniel to the engine room, much to Daniel's chagrin, as he was making progress on his assessment. He was sure now that this was subsequent to the fall of the western Roman Empire, and Chichen Itza was a thriving settlement. That narrowed things down quite a bit. Ellen was fairly insistent, though.
She turned to address the two of them. "We need to better understand how this wormhole drive works. There could be an infinite number of universes out there. There has to be a way to determine where we end up when we activate it."
Daniel winced a bit. "We have looked at it, but the mathematics encoded in the drive system are exceedingly complicated. I don't have a complete memory of how it operates, but I do recall that altering the parameters without understanding things can have extremely bad results, bad enough that it was forbidden by the governing body of the Ancients."
Miles said, "I think I have to agree with Ellen on this one. We're not going to make any progress toward getting home without deciphering how it works."
Grudgingly, Daniel agreed. Internally, he felt irrational guilt over not having the answers. He was sure he could have explained it to them back when he was still ascended. Of course, he wouldn't have been allowed to explain it to them. Most of the flashes of insight he had were more along the lines of how Peter described his danger sense -- warnings of what was safe and what was not.
It took them three weeks of constant analysis before they made a kind of breakthrough when they realized that the drive actually created more than one wormhole. Prior to transit, it would open a handful of micro-wormholes in an attempt to verify a safe path. Daniel knew from personal experience that bad things could happen if a wormhole passed through a solar flare, for example. By looking at how the mathematics varied for the micro-wormholes, they were able to isolate the portions that were focused on spatial coordinates. By comparing the logs of past transits, they were then able to isolate the segments specifying the quantum signature of the target reality. It was a little unclear how they could translate Starfleet's quantum signature readings into targets for the Ancient drive, unfortunately. The first positive result, though, was that they determined that they could use the wormhole drive to move through space without hopping dimensions. That would make things much easier for traveling in realspace, as their limited warp drive was quite slow compared to what all of the space-farers in the crew knew from their personal experience.
Their initial test of the wormhole drive without changing realities accidentally dropped them in a low orbit over Scotland, much to their concern.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The four horses made their way over the Scottish moors, looking for signs of anything unusual. The weather was rather damp and foggy.
"Godric, are we going to ride across the breadth of the Kingdom?" asked the other male rider.
Godric favored him with a cool stare. "Sal, you know why we're here. Those reports of lights in the sky in Scotland coincided with that feeling that we all had last month."
One of the women, Rowena, added her thoughts. "We have to investigate. Somebody could be working a major ritual, and none of the light wizards and witches knew of anything happening this far north."
Salazar knew they were right, but by Merlin, he hated the damp. Scotland made him cranky.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
With more test runs conducted outside lunar orbit, the crew were confident that they could use the drive for translocation within the same dimension. They only attempted one transit that fiddled with a segment of the math that Daniel warned against. That test had shifted them fifteen days into the future, and all of their subsequent tests were exceedingly careful to avoid changing those parameters. With increasing confidence, they ran a test that dropped them within 500 meters of the surface of the dark side of the moon. As a native of her universe's Luna, Ripley found the barren landscape of the undeveloped satellite both beautiful and disquieting. They also tested it over interstellar distances, dropping down into the trinary Alpha Centauri system. That time, it was Miles who found the empty system a unique experience. The final test was to verify that they could teleport within an atmosphere. They debated trying Mars or Venus, but the three from universes with superpowers, Peter, Taylor and Jimmy, argued that they needed some way to get from space to the ground on Earth. The Ship of Fools had no teleporters and no shuttles. While there were obvious docking points for shuttles, the craft had been long gone before they had found the ship. The derelict where they had found Peter and Taylor had also been completely bereft of small craft, giving them little option but to land the ship if they wanted to debark.
After some debate, they decided to try and open a wormhole deep in the wilds of Scotland. It was sparsely populated, and they could hopefully keep their impact limited to the same geographic area as their earlier accidental flyover.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The four wizards and witches were awakened by a loud roaring noise and a disquieting feeling, similar but more powerful than the one that had prompted their search. From their camp, they could see bright light of a kind that indicated advanced sorcery. The four packed up camp, and hurried over to the location of the disruption. When they arrived, the air was still tingling, as if something had opened a hole in the magical field nearby.
"Do you feel that?" asked Rowena. "There's a lot of power concentrated here. There must be at least two, possibly more, ley lines running into convergence here. I don't think this place has been discovered, possibly not even by the druids."
Sal looked around the site. "This would be a good site for a fortification. It's naturally defensible, and there's a good site for a village nearby. The rise gives you a good view over all of the approaches."
Helga pointed off toward a nearby lake. "There's freshwater here, and that lake would be a perfect home for magical creatures. The soil seems good for Scotland, too."
Godric was more concerned about whatever it was that had brought them here. There was no sign that anybody had been here, but he was sure that something had been here in the early morning. "We still don't know what caused that disturbance that woke us from our sleep. Whatever it was may come back."
Suddenly, there was a flash of fire that startled the four. In the midst of them, a phoenix appeared. It flew over to Godric and hovered for a moment before settling on the large man's shoulder. For a moment, the four just stared in stunned silence.
Godric broke the silence. "Well, hello there, friend. What can we do for you?" They all recognized the phoenix as a creature of obvious goodness and light. When the bird began to sing, the sound made them relax from their state of alertness. Godric listened for a moment, and said, "She says this site is safe, and that it's what we've been seeking for our school. Hm."
"Well, I guess that's settled then. It would be hard to get a better endorsement than that of a phoenix. I guess the only question now is what we call it," said Helga.
That started another debate that lasted until it was time to make camp again.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"All right, based on our jump into Ellen's reality, we've come up with what we think might be able to get us back there with the drive," explained Miles.
"Why can't we just duplicate the jump that got us there?" asked Xander reasonably.
"It's not quite that simple," said Ripley. "The math changes based upon your point of origin. It's not so much like dialing a phone number as it is going to an offset from your current location."
"The Stargate network in my universe worked in a similar way. We had addresses for other worlds, but we had to adjust them for spatial drift on our own because our Gate had been disconnected from the network for thousands of years and hadn't been updated with the new stellar positions," added Daniel.
With that, everybody agreed that with their next jump, they would try to get Ellen Ripley back to her own universe.
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- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
He's quite good at making potions ...
- Location
- Maryland
Yes, but potion-making in the Dresden-verse is all about understanding symbolic magic. The physical properties of the ingredients are practically irrelevant unless those properties have an impact on the caster's perception of their effect. I'm assuming alchemy is closer to magical chemistry, where the physical properties of a substance are analyzed to see how it reacts to magical stimuli.
- Location
- United states
And thus Harry Dresden gets to see one of his inspirations...
- Location
- On the sofa. (Probably)
In the series the ZPM is referred to having in it an artificial region of space time. Energy is extracted from that region until no more can be extracted and thus the ZPM is depleted.
The reason for not extracting zero point energy from our own universe was that doing that would produce exotic radiation from some sort of feedback due to having both the extraction hardware and the region being used in the same place instead of being isolated from each other.
In the Atlantis episode where they try extracting energy from a parallel universe it turned out that exotic particles appeared in the universe from where the energy was extracted and was causing havoc. It remained unclear if this happened in the artificial space inside ZPMs or if the artificial nature of that space precluded this.
I remember that a full ZPM could destroy a star system if you cracked it whilst drawing energy from it but that this wasn't a problem for a depleted ZPM or if it was idle. From this I can infer that nothing dangerous is building up inside that artificial region as that should be released if you crack a depleted ZPM.
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Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
I will admit that I want to see what O'Brien does when Kevin produces a home-made Tricorder... And, what Dragon has to say when she examines the tech of Ship of Fools... Not to mention what Linda has to say about the whole mess...
Odds on Linda asking Saurial and Raptaur for parts, as she starts in on what she considers the minimum required work?
A few virtual vehicles which will act as EVA kit would be nice, maybe like micro shuttles... Though, giving them orbit-to-ground-to-orbit capability would likely be tricky...
Avoiding Linda and Dragon being told about The Varga will be fun... Will the crew, maybe off-camera, be warned before they arrive? Otherwise, cat-out-of-bag, can-of-worms situations... Hope Harry and Taylor remember about 'Varga' being a secret identity...
On the tech...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the controls using a mix of Ancient (Ur Latin), English (Federation flavour) and English-Chinese (Firefly flavour)? Even LCARS on its own is going to be hard work for anyone but O'Brien...
Odds on Linda asking Saurial and Raptaur for parts, as she starts in on what she considers the minimum required work?
A few virtual vehicles which will act as EVA kit would be nice, maybe like micro shuttles... Though, giving them orbit-to-ground-to-orbit capability would likely be tricky...
Avoiding Linda and Dragon being told about The Varga will be fun... Will the crew, maybe off-camera, be warned before they arrive? Otherwise, cat-out-of-bag, can-of-worms situations... Hope Harry and Taylor remember about 'Varga' being a secret identity...
On the tech...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the controls using a mix of Ancient (Ur Latin), English (Federation flavour) and English-Chinese (Firefly flavour)? Even LCARS on its own is going to be hard work for anyone but O'Brien...
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- Location
- Beyond the Unknowable Veil
LCARS can be reconfigured for other interfaces. One presumes languages for humans is far easier than trying to accommodate physiologies that use senses radically different from humans. Or limbs. Imagine an eyeless species that seed with fine grade sonar? That guy could read Braille from across the room. Tuvok used a tactile interface during the Year of Hell storyline after he was blinded.
Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
I will admit that I want to see what O'Brien does when Kevin produces a home-made Tricorder... And, what Dragon has to say when she examines the tech of Ship of Fools... Not to mention what Linda has to say about the whole mess...
Odds on Linda asking Saurial and Raptaur for parts, as she starts in on what she considers the minimum required work?
A few virtual vehicles which will act as EVA kit would be nice, maybe like micro shuttles... Though, giving them orbit-to-ground-to-orbit capability would likely be tricky...
Avoiding Linda and Dragon being told about The Varga will be fun... Will the crew, maybe off-camera, be warned before they arrive? Otherwise, cat-out-of-bag, can-of-worms situations... Hope Harry and Taylor remember about 'Varga' being a secret identity...
On the tech...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the controls using a mix of Ancient (Ur Latin), English (Federation flavour) and English-Chinese (Firefly flavour)? Even LCARS on its own is going to be hard work for anyone but O'Brien...
I mean, components of the ship will be interesting, but ultimately when the Motley Crewe meet the Infinite Improbability Reptile, the original Ship of Fools will be easily replaced. Because the Infinite Improbability Reptile is effectively an arbitrarily perfect replicator. So, at that point there isn't much reason not to create a reasonable facsimile of one of the Pimp Hands of The Sisko (also known as the Defiant Class) with cheats from the Infinite Improbability Reptile such as a bolt-together EDM frame and armor plate over the hull, EDM flywheels for energy storage so they don't have to worry about that pesky antimatter problem, Linda's superconductors for most of the power supply transfer, Fractally Folded deuterium tanks for absurdly large fusion reactors protected by an even bigger chunk of EDM (still pretty much invulnerable to anything anybody in Trek or SG could throw at it), etc. And the mad things are cannonically landing capable as well similar to the Intrepid class, so there's that as well. On the other hand, the Infinite Improbability Reptile can rebuild the class's shuttlebay to fit the original Ship of Fools thanks to Varga Demonic Fractional Bullshit, so they can take it with them.
Of course, that means that the Infinite Improbability Reptile (also known as the class act of Taylor Fucking Hebert and the Varga) will now be the Warp-Speed Infinite Improbability Reptile, with transporters and everything else. Which actually, come to think of it, would not be as much of an upgrade as you would think.
Excuse me but...
A tactile interface is enough to stand on its own merits. Voyager has nothing to do with that.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
Pretty sure Daniel and Miles O'Brien wouldn't want them to do that...
There's a number of reasons.
- One major one being you don't let people re-build your ship with tech you don't understand and can't repair yourself. Also, having a ship that looks like a junk heap (yes, I know there're much less polite terms) is useful to get people to underestimate you.
- Ship of Fools is an unarmed transport vessel. Making an obvious (or in-obvious, like a Q Ship) armed vessel, never mind a warship, is asking for trouble, and may well get an immediate attack in some places. At least confiscation. You might want to consider how heavily armed the TARDIS is... Yes, almost all ship's drives count as weapons - if nothing else they can get you to where drop-the-rock is devastating.
- How portable is your tech, in terms of different physics in different worlds? So far they've hit worlds where subspace has the same characteristics as in the Star Trek setting, and worlds where the Ancient tech wormhole drive operates. Go to the wrong place and while lower tech may be OK, the impulse/warp drive stops working, and maybe the replicator (if it uses subspace, as I suspect); not to mention the communicators, probably the phasors, even tricorders. O'Brien might be able to adjust stuff so it works, but... It's very likely some of the 'bad' settings for the wormhole drive are one-way trips. Of course, Harry might be able to get them out of there...
- I'd have doubts about relying on the Family dimension mangling if you're hopping universes without Varga'd Taylor there. For the probability distortion effect so you don't go to one where they stop working, maybe explosively, if nothing else. Taylor could likely wrangle any math fixes needed, possibly The Varga could stabalise things while they fix them. Anyone else? I wouldn't bet.
- I'd recommend against any really exotic materials in your ship that aren't provided, or at least OK'd, by an experienced wanderer of the universes. Such as whoever dumped the SoF team in this situation together. EDM could be really, really, unwise... Best failure case is it isn't there when you arrive.
- Customs. Run by people like the Q. The sort who check everything as it arrives in-universe, by almost any means at all. Even if you evade them, they could be even more upset if/when they catch-up with you. Ship of Fools looks to be the sort of vessel that'd get through without much argument.
Basically, small, unarmed, looks like a heap of junk - useful characteristics for a universe-hopping ship.
I know it's fun to stack tech from multiple universes together in fun ways, but, there may be downsides...
Anyone got a Universal Constant Analyser, that you can use to 'sniff' potential destinations and find if at least the physics is OK?
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- Location
- Maryland
I have to stop myself from giving away plot in advance of writing, so I'll just say this.
The combination of Dragon, Leet, Vectura and Varga are stupidly overpowered. One is a transportation tinker, one is a tinker that can make literally anything once, one can take other tinkers work and turn it into non-tinker engineering, and the last can make any combination of matter and energy at will. In a period of a couple of months, they literally created a nuclear shotgun for killing Endbringers, a fully functional wormhole terminal, an enhanced Tron lightcycle, and a functioning mech that can survive in hostile environments, go into stealth mode, and is still mostly maintainable by regular folks. Then we have the ludicrously lethal security fence. Add in Lisa's bullshit analysis capabilities, and Amy's ability to make new species and create symbiotes that heal anything and make you immortal.
Honestly, there is no dramatic tension in Taylor Varga based upon threats. It's like reading a Superman comic. You either come up with some made-up weakness, or you derive entertainment from the means by which problems are solved and the trollish nature of a being who can eat, step on, vaporize, or science and magic the shit out of literally any problem you can imagine.
Ace Dreamer
Verified Reality User
- Location
- Between The Unknown & The Known
You mean you're not going to reveal that The Varga has a secret fear of goats?
Maybe goats that have fur patterns that take the form of anti-Varga-demon runes?
Or, can't stand people who go "Ni!"?
I'm shocked!
Nice story, and I'm impressed by the quality of your writing.
Richardson
CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?
- Location
- Yes
Pretty sure Daniel and Miles O'Brien wouldn't want them to do that...
There's a number of reasons.
- One major one being you don't let people re-build your ship with tech you don't understand and can't repair yourself. Also, having a ship that looks like a junk heap (yes, I know there're much less polite terms) is useful to get people to underestimate you.
- Ship of Fools is an unarmed transport vessel. Making an obvious (or in-obvious, like a Q Ship) armed vessel, never mind a warship, is asking for trouble, and may well get an immediate attack in some places. At least confiscation. You might want to consider how heavily armed the TARDIS is... Yes, almost all ship's drives count as weapons - if nothing else they can get you to where drop-the-rock is devastating.
- How portable is your tech, in terms of different physics in different worlds? So far they've hit worlds where subspace has the same characteristics as in the Star Trek setting, and worlds where the Ancient tech wormhole drive operates. Go to the wrong place and while lower tech may be OK, the impulse/warp drive stops working, and maybe the replicator (if it uses subspace, as I suspect); not to mention the communicators, probably the phasors, even tricorders. O'Brien might be able to adjust stuff so it works, but... It's very likely some of the 'bad' settings for the wormhole drive are one-way trips. Of course, Harry might be able to get them out of there...
- I'd have doubts about relying on the Family dimension mangling if you're hopping universes without Varga'd Taylor there. For the probability distortion effect so you don't go to one where they stop working, maybe explosively, if nothing else. Taylor could likely wrangle any math fixes needed, possibly The Varga could stabalise things while they fix them. Anyone else? I wouldn't bet.
- I'd recommend against any really exotic materials in your ship that aren't provided, or at least OK'd, by an experienced wanderer of the universes. Such as whoever dumped the SoF team in this situation together. EDM could be really, really, unwise... Best failure case is it isn't there when you arrive.
- Customs. Run by people like the Q. The sort who check everything as it arrives in-universe, by almost any means at all. Even if you evade them, they could be even more upset if/when they catch-up with you. Ship of Fools looks to be the sort of vessel that'd get through without much argument.
Basically, small, unarmed, looks like a heap of junk - useful characteristics for a universe-hopping ship.
I know it's fun to stack tech from multiple universes together in fun ways, but, there may be downsides...
Anyone got a Universal Constant Analyser, that you can use to 'sniff' potential destinations and find if at least the physics is OK?
One, EDM is effectively already known to the Federation, even if they can't really work it or make it. They call it neutronium. (not the actual neutronium, but...) And, it pretty much makes them invincible to anything that could concievably be a threat to them, because the stuff is already 'can take legends BDZ' grade bullshit. Anything that punches through EDM or can effectively do things to it? They're already well past surviving it, because it will fry everything inside of the ship from the spalling energy inside. We're talking 'Borg cube gets annoyed but can't do anything more than effectively hitting it with a squeaky hammer' levels tough. Some of the more bullshit Asgard/Ancient stuff from SG might do the trick, as might maybe Sting from the worm-side, but you're almost certainly never going to hurt it. And, if you're into a setting where the stuff fails? You're already screwed because it's probably a setting where the warp drive and wormhole drive will fail as well, stranding you. So, odds are by narrator fiat they will likely 99%+ odds always hit universes where the tech and goodies they already have still work. Now, if you want to avoid Family Fractal Fuckery, that's totally fine, though. Granted, it'll probably hold up as well, but if they want to go 'okay, no chances' then the flywheels by themselves without folding are still absurdly bullshit due to the power capacities, and charging them with fusion reactors of lesser size works well enough if you have a hull that can take a set of reactors of decent size, and can take EDM flywheels. Ironically, a proper feddie ship would actually be best for this, because those big saucers make for excellent flywheel storage, especially if you come up with a set that's more like the rim of a wheel and counter-wheels to maintain gyroscopic balance and more power. Though older ships, such as the Constitution, would be best for this. Actually, an updated Connie Refit with uprated warp nacelles would be perfect, and slapping a semi-detachable cargo-harness over the engineering hull lets you get away with selling the 'totes an innocent interdimensional freighter' bullshit because the class doesn't LOOK armed by the standards of sci-fi.
And, again, I'm not proposing that Vectura get her hands on the ship proper. Nah, just leveraging the federation techbase with Varga's material bullshit to let them build the ship that they otherwise couldn't, with the kind of hull and absurd over-engineering that lets them get away with a lot of things they otherwise couldn't.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No magic. No stable EDM.
- Location
- Maryland, USA
Why not just replace the memory yourself? Memory isn't that expensive and you would have yourcomputer back a lot faster than sending the entire box back to the OEM.
- Location
- Maryland
It isn't the memory modules themselves. It is the memory slots on the board or the mother board itself. I'm not exactly sure of the exact cause of the periodic faults, but I did go through all of the standard debugging that I could do easily, including trying a new graphics card, swapping out the SIMM cards, etc.
Part of the reason I'm holding off on a fix is that it is clearly an accumulative problem -- the machine works fine when it first boots, and works for hours. After it has been on for 12 or so hours, the risk of a fault starts to increase. Infrequently, it results in a crash and write to cache. More often, I just get situations where games won't load because of memory errors, and a soft reboot fixes that. If I were diligent enough to do a soft reboot daily, I would probably drop the error frequency quite a bit.
I'm hesitant to just shut if off completely, as there was a period of time where the graphics card would fail to start from a hard reboot. The only way to fix that was to remove one of the memory cards, reboot, and then put the card back and reboot again. Oddly enough...that behavior seems to have gone away for some mysterious reason.
I am fully cognizant of the fact that this is not the safest or most sensible approach from a PC maintenance perspective.