sythyry | (no subject)

A Mistake ... or a Subtle Nendrai Trap? [27 Nivvem 4261]

(Answer: a subtle nendrai trap. Unquestionably.)

I was already in the air, since everyone was much bigger than me. I stupidly fluttered around Vae's heads and warbled "What's wrong, Vae? Are you OK?" and other such useless matters. Until I realized I was talking to one of the fake heads, and tried two more before I found one. By which time Vae had more or less calmed down, though she was still tailthwacking the ground and turning beetles into miniature tornadoes and grass into burning squirrels. Still, as I did it, I had visions of Prof. Dargwyn picking up a thesaurus and looking for the harshest possible adjectives for my semester's grade.

Vae:"Ow! What a very strange hurt that was!"

Me:"What happened?"

Vae:"The something very generous with the pain! Also, convulsions."

Seeks-4262:"Magical convulsions, it looks like. That's pretty unusual. Has it ever happened to you before?"

Vae turned back into her usual hideous self, and stopped with the high-grade magical assault on nothing in particular.

Txiane:"Oh, me, I'm very sorry ... I hope I didn't offend you?"

Vae:"Not a bit! But your egg was most amazingly painful."

Txiane:"It's never done that before..."

(I note in retrospect that Txiane is speaking like a normal person, not like Vae. Either Vae copied Fiarel's language for him (which would have been rude, and someone surely would have noticed), or Vae copied her own (likely) and chooses to speak oddly for her own reasons.)

Vae:"Not still is it doing it."

All the magic students stared at the egg for a while. It's offworld magic, which I've never seen before (unless I'm forgetting something), and that makes it look very odd. I'll discuss it later if I feel like. Aside from looking very odd, it's also pretty boring. It's just about a very simple Heal Once kind of spell, only with its god-connections tied in a knot back to itself. Anyways, it couldn't cause pain, unless you crammed it up someone's cloaca or something.

Then, of course, it was time for tea and theology.

Tea

The Tea: Tassington and Brathny's "Noble Duke of Charrow" blend, which is very nice. Fiarel had bought a packet of it in town on the way out. I can supply water.

Me:"Vae, everyone, would you like some tea?"

Vae:"The yes! The quickly soon!"

Yes, I knew what I was offering to her. I feel rather like a whore at times, and a whore with an underage and unwilling customer at that. But Vae seemed so shaken by the episode that it seemed the right thing, to give her an extra gift and the concomitant pleasure. Sometime, I hope, I shall get a less disgusting job.

The Theology

Seeks-4262, Rhedwy, Fiarel, and I had a long discussion about what happened, with Vae listening and moping, and Txiane listening and looking rather baffled. (Txiane:"I know all the words now, but it still doesn't make any sense." Evidently the theology of his home world is rather different.)

Our conclusion -- and we're going to write an academic paper about it -- is this.

Nendrai experience pleasure when they get things from primes.
Nendrai experience nothing when they get things from native monsters.
Nendrai experience nothing when they get things from certain off-world monsters. Vae has been off-world once or twice, and knows this.
Txiane is a para-Orren, though. It's not exactly clear what that means in full detail, but he is the closest thing his world has to an Orren (except Fiarel, of course), and he is close enough so that ... um ... we're not sure exactly what that means.
But, it seems (from limited experimentation) that nendrai experience convulsive agony when they get things from off-world para-primes.
Presumably Gnarn designed this intentionally when she created the nendrai.
Now, why would she do this?
Well, it seems likely that the pleasure stuff is intended to keep nendrai close to primes, and constantly interacting with them, so that we (primes) get the greatest amount of trouble per unit nendrai. Vae is a good case in point.
And, if one is a wicked god, and one is building a monster with freakishly powerful Mutoc, and even more freakishly powerful Mutoc Locador -- one might be aware that one's monsters could easily leave one's universe, and zap themselves about the pancosmos for amusement. Or to escape from interacting with Gnarn's primes. Perhaps, somewhere, they might find some other primes -- or, at any rate, creatures close enough to primes to trigger the pleasure stuff that Gnarn so carefully built into the nendrai. (After all, primes are built in what surely must be the seven most sensible shapes for sentient and civilized species anywhere -- excluding the Khtsoyis of course -- so it's hardly unlikely to find para-primes (whatever that may mean) in other universes. Witness Txiane, for one..)
So, a suitably clever and wicked god (e.g. Gnarn) might well incorporate safeguards into her designs. Thus, we conjecture based on limited direct testing ("Not a bit more testing shall you do on me!" says Vae, "For the hurting and the paining of the one test was plenty and more than plenty. Also next time I might destroy half of Vheshrame Mene.".) that only true primes are prime-like enough to please nendrai ("The pleasure me, maybe. Not a bit does it please me." says Vae.) Para-primes (whatever they may be) are actively discouraged, as is the activity of going offworld to seek them.
(Highly cogent concluding paragraph goes here in the final paper.)

On Insulting Nendrai

Vae:"And what chances do you think I have, when I go try to kill the goddess?"

Me:"None. Are you going to try to kill the goddess?"

Vae:"Not today, I fear me. Not tomorrow either. The day I have some tolerable chance, I shall do. Not so insulted have I ever been, ever."

(I don't recommend the practice of insulting nendrai unless you are a god yourself.)

After the other primes and para-prime left, Vae cried, moped, whined, complained, and otherwise radiated misery at me for a very long time -- so long that I missed my date with Jinthinia. Vae was thoroughly insulted.

It is offensive to nendrai that they are made as playthings of a goddess. (Sorry, nendrai. Everyone else was too.)
It is even more offensive to nendrai that the terms of their being playthings are so undignified. Some creatures get their own odd emotions, like mherobump having andile. Some creatures get good reasons for hating primes, like us stealing their land. But the nendrai -- who, in their own estimation and many other peoples' too, are the grandest and most terrible monsters of all -- get these crude, haphazard controls, of base pleasure and base pain. So, undignified.
And the fact that Vae has holes in her psyche as well, which is more dignified, is no consolation. Instead it is a separate insult.
Getting comfort from a Zi Ri counts as getting something from a Zi Ri. Repeatedly over the course of the afternoon. If I could please Jinthinia this many times in an evening, I'd be the greatest lover on the World Tree. Standing up my girlfriend to repeatedly pleasure a monster is thoroughly offensive to me, as is repeatedly getting pleasured when she wants to get comforted is to the nendrai.

So the evening probably was just what Gnarn wanted. I can't say that the participants were delighted by it.

And I still have to make it up to Jinthinia somehow.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

redbird

This won't help any in making things up with Jinthinia, I'm afraid: it's on the academic side.

Specifically, I'm wondering whether the pain of Vae receiving that egg was primarily or exclusively that it was a gift from a para-prime, or if its being of para-prime manufacture is more relevant.

If Vae hadn't sworn off further involvement in research here, the logical things to try would be for Txiane to give her some small object made by primes (a bit of pastry, perhaps) or for you to buy one of those eggs from Txiane and give it to Vae.

From: (Anonymous)

Or what if txiane gave the egg to a prime, who gave it to Vae?

From:

gavinfox.livejournal.com

That was me, and I didnt see the last part of the post I was replying to... soo yea...

From:

kris-schnee.livejournal.com

I'm interested in the physics of offworld travel. If matter on the World Tree is made of 12 (19?) elements, yet stuff can be brought to and from other universes, then either those other universes have the same basic physics, or there's some sort of translation process involved. (And is the translation something designed by the gods, or just part of multiversal physics?) If you brought an object from our world to one with a different value for the strong/weak nuclear forces, it would probably vanish and/or explode if those new values suddenly applied. What would happen if there were an entirely different set of rules for what kinds of matter exist and what laws apply to them? For instance, WT has no magnetic force, so would a terrestrial magnet brought to WT get translated into WT matter with some sort of Ruloc Durador magic, or just stop working? Would a human brought to WT suddenly be made of Corpador instead of carbon? Would a WT prime be able to breathe Earthly oxygen? This is speculation that goes way beyond "Flatland" in looking at different "dimensions."

From:

sythyry.livejournal.com

As far as I understand -- which is none too far (I must ask Fiarel if I get to see her before she goes back) -- our gods have a sort of exchange program with the gods of nearby universes, so that natives of one universe are translated to suitable materials for whatever cooperating universe they happen to be in at the time. This is not a satisfactory answer to your question, for which apologies.

From:

kensan-oni.livejournal.com

... This bodes exceptionally badly if Boony and her Mark of Boon ever make it to your universe. I hope you have very excellent trap builders and disarmers.

From:

sythyry.livejournal.com

Um ... Boony?

From:

kensan-oni.livejournal.com

Boony, the goddess of traps! The legends say that she was a prison designer that went a little mad after she started to go adventuring. She started to find ways to defend people from other people by cleverly hidden traps. She started small, with exploding bodice strings. Eventually she designed a whole house that would slowly and surely destroy itself to kill anyone that was not in a very small area next to a panic button.

Her ascension to goddess hood happened, when she withing twelve seconds juryrigged a clothesline trap, and tripped a dragon in mid-flight, to destroy an interstellar portal between two worlds that stopped an invasion, and killed the said dragon...

... which I appologize to you, as Zin-Ri are very much like dragons, but much smaller, but this is the legend, at is has been told. The eveidence of her goddesshood can be observed in her home town, where the Tower Of Boon has become a thrill seekers death tourist trap of sorts, that has a wealthy treasure at the bottom most level... however, it is in a extra-dimensional space that is constantly changing as Boony thinks of and designs even more feindish and clever traps designed to help protect people from other people... not that anyone wants her help, really...

From:

kris-schnee.livejournal.com

And what's this from? You've got me curious.

From:

kensan-oni.livejournal.com

((Boony is a character from a D&D/Dragonstar game I once played. It was decided she was somewhere between too powerful, and too scary to keep around, and I think the DM was looking to the future when she became 7 rog/7 wiz and would be running around with 4th level spells. She had an awesome run, and did some fabulous things, like a great chase across roof tops to leap and land on a running away villian. Sneak Attack Death From Above! (Well, Death was a strong work, but it was a moment where dice and story came together!))

From:

terrycloth.livejournal.com

The author of Unicorn Jelly had a interesting take on it -- each material was replaced by a close analogue, that usually worked about the same. So, iron atoms were replaced by 'iron' chatoyance triads (or whatever) and most of the molecular reactions sort of worked the same, since the replacement happened on a lower level.

Of course, it was only *mostly* the same, and there were things that did or didn't work right, the upshot being terrestrial living creatures needed to take injections of a certain supplement or basically starve to death.

Of course, if I were a god, I'd do my replacement on a much higher level, and bring para-orrens into the universe as proper orrens with only two arms.

From:

sythyry.livejournal.com

(Yay, Unicorn Jelly!)

It sounds generally similar, except that at least for foreigners in the World Tree, the ones doing the conversion are sentient.

Do you plan to be a god any time soon?

From:

terrycloth.livejournal.com

No, the religion that lets you be a god after you die is too expensive.

From:

kris-schnee.livejournal.com

That raises the problem of what the equivalents are! Douglas Hofstadter, AI researcher, has written in his interesting-but-really-confusing Godel, Escher, Bach and AI-focused Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies about what translation means. He shows for instance English, French, and German versions of "Jabberwocky." How do you translate a nonsense word? Similarly, I've got a good (Penguin) verse translation of The Canterbury Tales that tries to update some of the jokes while preserving the spirit and the verse structure, which means changing the exact wording a lot. Anyway, Hofstadter proposed that AI will come from figuring out how living minds work on some fairly high level, and then translating that system of symbol-arrangement to a different "substrate" like silicon. Converting a mind between worlds would probably work in a similar way.

For "translating" a character between worlds, you'd need some protocol for what aspects of it (er, zir) are important. What about the person's mind? If you were sending an Earthly human to WT, you'd need some way of reading the thoughts encoded in a blob of electrified meat and writing the equivalent in, what, particles of Mentador? Plus we're told that there's a distinct "soul" and "mind" to WT primes. I suspect that if you went back and forth between worlds, you'd end up with a dangerously scrambled brain, equivalent to running a paragraph back and forth through translators! To get it even remotely right you'd need a deep understanding of how minds work in each world, which suggests that if you're a god interested in multiversal travel, you really ought to look into a standardized mind format.

I ought to write a story about this! I haven't seen much about this concept.

From:

terrycloth.livejournal.com

Well, to fix the multiple translation problem, I was thinking of something like:

Step 1: Create a pocket universe obeying the laws on universe A, and put the traveller in it.
Step 2: Create a terminal body in universe B
Step 3: Map the sensory impressions from the terminal into sensory impressions received by the stored 'real body', and similarly map motor impulses.

Things like 'vision' and 'I want to move my hand' have to be easier to translate than the actual physical structure of stored memory. And at the very least, it's safer. For one thing, if the 'traveller' dies, he just wakes up back in his own world none the worse for wear. Well, unless you decide to kill him to maintain versimilitude.

The other way to make sure you don't lose too much in translation is to keep around anything you'd otherwise discard and round-trip it. Make sure your translation is lossless -- the traveller in the alternate universe might have additional information relating to his mind hanging around in some form that natives would not.

From:

kris-schnee.livejournal.com

I like the first one. That's a sort of virtual reality approach, preserving a person's mind and even allowing a way to visit without dying. That doesn't explain inanimate objects like Sythyry's metal trowel, though; presumably they'd skip Steps 1 and 3. Greg Bear's "Blood Music" also implies that a person getting translated to a new medium (human to blood-borne nanite) would get copied, but the copy wouldn't necessarily get deleted when the person wanted to leave. The Para-Orren could stay in WT and go home. And if he ever came back, he'd take over the WT copy of his body, which might have diverged from him in the meantime! And of course the gods/translators could give travelers local bodies that don't quite translate, as a joke or just to match the natives. ("I have a tail?")

Because the new Universe B body would have its own brain-equivalent, it'd either have to be suppressed or start storing memories and thoughts of its own, which would affect the traveler. A really dedicated traveler might want to kill their original body after making sure they've developed a local mind!

-K, finishing a not-very-interesting paper about aquaculture

From:

justicezero.livejournal.com

I suspect that the primary concern with such a translation is that the object must remain internally consistant. However, external consistancy is at best a secondary concern. It may be likely that things are mapped onto existing analogous models - were I to meet Sythyry, for instance, I might be mapped to, for instance, a para-Rassimel form. Variants in thought can repaired with some form of sustenoc, healoc, spiritidor, I don't know what exactly. It seems within the limits of Vae's ability to build an appropriate container, so certainly it is within the capacity of the gods. That container, while internally consistant, might, however, respond oddly. Devices which contain small metal parts, for instance, might have those parts replaces with wood and magic in some cases under close inspection, and no longer respond to magnetics as expected, though it functions as expected internally.

From:

yotogi.livejournal.com

Perpendicular to the discussion, but... andile?

From:

vik_thor

an emotion that mherobumps were given by their creator. It can only be satisfied by hard labour. They have dug immense caverns and carted hills from one side of a river to the other.

They would have probably loved building the Egyptian pyramids.