Story Friday August 26, 2016

[Vorlonagent 442]

13 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

I think this is a good part of what Pandora wants her to do, too. Well spotted.

If Sarah went about her job with enough enthusiasm, Pandora would be able to award her with an awakening.

[hkmaly 490]

17 hours ago, ijuin said:

Tedd did refer to automated defenses/alarms having been set up in the Verres house by his father in http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1519 I think that this indicates that anything that would create an easily-detected magical signature would be noticed.

Yet the Whale, Disco Wizard and Pandora all got through.

Also, thanks for the link. For reference, I though there was something about magic defenses here, but there isn't.

4 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

17 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

I think this is a good part of what Pandora wants her to do, too. Well spotted.

If Sarah went about her job with enough enthusiasm, Pandora would be able to award her with an awakening.

With enough enthusiasm, she could awaken even herself. But yes, I guess there is some point where she wouldn't awake herself but Pandora can awaken her.

[Vorlonagent 442]

46 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

With enough enthusiasm, she could awaken even herself. But yes, I guess there is some point where she wouldn't awake herself but Pandora can awaken her.

I expect there's a fairly large gulf between when Pandora could wake Sarah before Sarah could wake on her own.  Much depends on how much Sarah's work at Tedd's Lab counts as training and how much she uses her own Mark as compared with something known to work like ASMA training.

[hkmaly 490]

33 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

With enough enthusiasm, she could awaken even herself. But yes, I guess there is some point where she wouldn't awake herself but Pandora can awaken her.

I expect there's a fairly large gulf between when Pandora could wake Sarah before Sarah could wake on her own.  Much depends on how much Sarah's work at Tedd's Lab counts as training and how much she uses her own Mark as compared with something known to work like ASMA training.

Not if dramatic enough. There is probably fairly large gulf between "Pandora can wake Sarah" and "Sarah has so much training she wakes up just from that", but dramatic circumstances - like murdered family or disappointment over origin story - can likely wake her from point close to where Pandora can wake her.

[Vorlonagent 442]

1 minute ago, hkmaly said:

Not if dramatic enough. There is probably fairly large gulf between "Pandora can wake Sarah" and "Sarah has so much training she wakes up just from that", but dramatic circumstances - like murdered family or disappointment over origin story - can likely wake her from point close to where Pandora can wake her.

Agreed.  Magic likes Drama, which makes up for a lot.

[Scotty 1,061]

44 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

57 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Not if dramatic enough. There is probably fairly large gulf between "Pandora can wake Sarah" and "Sarah has so much training she wakes up just from that", but dramatic circumstances - like murdered family or disappointment over origin story - can likely wake her from point close to where Pandora can wake her.

Agreed.  Magic likes Drama, which makes up for a lot.

Susan might have been on the verge of awakening already due to her frequent use of the hammers. Justin might also have been close to awakening due to ASMA training. I would expect that a premature awakening might count as an improper awakening.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

10 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Susan might have been on the verge of awakening already due to her frequent use of the hammers.

I suspect that her frequent summoning of Nase had at least as much effect on her magic capacity as the hammers did, if not considerably more.  The hammers, until she awoke, ran off of Jerry's energy, not the caster's energy.  There's likely a little use of your own innate energy, but so small that it won't do much as far as strength training.  Like doing arm curls with no weights in your hand.  Nase, on the other hand, was all her own spell doing the work.

1 hour ago, Vorlonagent said:

Much depends on how much Sarah's work at Tedd's Lab counts as training and how much she uses her own Mark as compared with something known to work like ASMA training.

From what Pandora told Sarah, the way it seems to work is that Sarah has a small enough personal pool of magical energy that every time she casts her spell, she uses it all up, plus a big bite out of the ambient energy.  If she casts it again before her own energy has recharged, then she uses only the ambient energy, and that has no effect on her own powers.  If she waits until her own energy has recharged and then casts her spell, it counts as a workout and moves her a little closer to having a big enough pool to Awaken.  Each time she casts the spell, she uses up as much of her personal energy as it's possible to do, so there is no better workout for building magic strength than casting her own spell.  If she put some of that energy toward ASMA classes instead, she'd either improve at the same speed, or even slow herself down.

One thing we don't know for certain is the effect of using her spell when she's not yet at full power.  Let's say that her pool is ten points.  Is there any difference between Sarah casting her spell, then waiting until she's built back all ten points, then casting it again (using up all ten); and Sarah casting her spell, then casting it again as soon as she has a single point built up, ten times?  I suspect that if she's trying to increase the size of her magic pool, then it would be more effective to use up the entire pool of points at once, but I can't think of any evidence to confirm it.  I suspect I'm seeing it as an analogy to muscles, where you'll increase mass and strength faster if you train to exhaustion than if you lift half the weight twice as many times.

 

Has anyone put together an EGS RPG yet?

[Scotty 1,061]

Just now, CritterKeeper said:

I suspect that her frequent summoning of Nase had at least as much effect on her magic capacity as the hammers did, if not considerably more.  The hammers, until she awoke, ran off of Jerry's energy, not the caster's energy.  There's likely a little use of your own innate energy, but so small that it won't do much as far as strength training.  Like doing arm curls with no weights in your hand.  Nase, on the other hand, was all her own spell doing the work.

The thing is, Susan only summoned Nase twice before she awakened, though if she was summoning the other objects in her storage box that would have helped, but I suspect she didn't do that often.

22 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

Has anyone put together an EGS RPG yet?

I'm sure it could be done, dunno about story but there seems to be enough of a setting to put something together like a fanfic.

[hkmaly 490]

25 minutes ago, Scotty said:

The thing is, Susan only summoned Nase twice before she awakened, though if she was summoning the other objects in her storage box that would have helped, but I suspect she didn't do that often.

Apparently, she did that often enough.

Given how easily she run through what she has in the box, she must have some experience. While there probably wasn't SO many cases like the goo, she probably trained with her weapons to be prepared in case other aberration appears.

Also, USING nase counts as using magic, not only the summoning, and she had it outside for hours.

51 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

Each time she casts the spell, she uses up as much of her personal energy as it's possible to do, so there is no better workout for building magic strength than casting her own spell.  If she put some of that energy toward ASMA classes instead, she'd either improve at the same speed, or even slow herself down.

We don't KNOW that. Sure, the "improve at the same speed" would make sense, and the ASMA classes are not really good at training magic because they exhaust physically more than magically. But we can't be sure ASMA training wouldn't help her.

51 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

I suspect I'm seeing it as an analogy to muscles, where you'll increase mass and strength faster if you train to exhaustion than if you lift half the weight twice as many times.

I find that hard to believe in the muscles case as well. I think I read somewhere than lifting half the weight twice as many times is better, and you will burn more calories per mile by walking than running ... on the other hand, I'm not expert on this.

25 minutes ago, Scotty said:

51 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

Has anyone put together an EGS RPG yet?

I'm sure it could be done, dunno about story but there seems to be enough of a setting to put something together like a fanfic.

You can't make one from canon informations only and if you add something, you'll risk conflict with canon later.

[ijuin 572]

4 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Yet the Whale, Disco Wizard and Pandora all got through.

Well, in Pandora's case, it's already been established that Immortals have magical stealth that cannot be penetrated even by other Immortals, so I wouldn't expect any magic-sensing alarms to detect her via magical signature.

[hkmaly 490]

7 minutes ago, ijuin said:

4 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Yet the Whale, Disco Wizard and Pandora all got through.

Well, in Pandora's case, it's already been established that Immortals have magical stealth that cannot be penetrated even by other Immortals, so I wouldn't expect any magic-sensing alarms to detect her via magical signature.

... which, to return to start of discussion, is why Pandora probably COULD've appear before Tedd even in his house without Edward not knowing.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

42 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I find that hard to believe in the muscles case as well. I think I read somewhere than lifting half the weight twice as many times is better, and you will burn more calories per mile by walking than running ... on the other hand, I'm not expert on this.

I took classes on this at the university level, so while not an expert, I do know what I'm talking about.  If your goal is to increase strength, that is, increase the amount of weight you can lift, then the best way to do it is to do a set of 8-10 repetitions for men, 10-12 for women, with weights that are heavy enough that you can just barely complete the set.  Do three sets for each exercise.  It's also most effective if you give your muscles time to recover in between workouts, exercising an area no more frequently than every other day.  That's why serious muscle-builders talk about doing a "leg day" or "upper body day."

Mind you, this is for increasing strength.  If your goal is to improve your heart and circulation, your endurance, etc. or to lose weight, then you want longer workouts with more sustainable intensity, such as swimming and running.  If for some reason you were to do such a workout using weights, you would then do lower weights and more repetitions, but that wouldn't increase your strength very efficiently.

Since Sarah is trying to increase the strength of her magical muscles, my mind naturally goes to strength-building types of exercise.  What Pandora said about using the spell a few times a day, far enough apart that her own magic had built back up again, seems like working to the point of exhaustion to me.  :-)

[ChaosSepher 10]

So they are not actually twin Sisters.  However the sheer identicalness and other factors certainly add up to something, and I hope Edward suspects something enough to look into that aspect.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

6 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... which, to return to start of discussion, is why Pandora probably COULD've appear before Tedd even in his house without Edward not knowing.

What if Pandora wants Edward to THINK his less-than-perfect anti-magic household defenses are actually effective?  If she deliberately tripped the alarm when she appeared before Tedd or Edward in the house, they would think the alarms are effective.  Edward wouldn't spend time trying to improve the home protection system, and Pandora and her tools can continue to get in and out of the Verres' house at their convenience.

[ijuin 572]

I think that Edward knows enough about Immortals that he is aware that they can mask their magical auras if they so wish. Pandora would register as a magically inactive entity until she started tossing spells around.

[Scotty 1,061]

8 minutes ago, ChaosSepher said:

So they are not actually twin Sisters.  However the sheer identicalness and other factors certainly add up to something, and I hope Edward suspects something enough to look into that aspect.

Psst....wrong thread.

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

16 hours ago, ChaosSepher said:

So they are not actually twin Sisters.  However the sheer identicalness and other factors certainly add up to something, and I hope Edward suspects something enough to look into that aspect.

 

7 hours ago, Scotty said:

Psst....wrong thread.

Not necessarily.  Perhaps Edward is someone's twin sister who had been forcibly transformed into a male at a very young age.  What Tedd thinks of as disapproval from dad with regards to gender bending is actually jealousy drawn from Edward's earliest memories of being a girl.

Wild theories can be a beautiful thing.

[hkmaly 490]

18 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

19 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I find that hard to believe in the muscles case as well. I think I read somewhere than lifting half the weight twice as many times is better, and you will burn more calories per mile by walking than running ... on the other hand, I'm not expert on this.

I took classes on this at the university level, so while not an expert, I do know what I'm talking about.  If your goal is to increase strength, that is, increase the amount of weight you can lift, then the best way to do it is to do a set of 8-10 repetitions for men, 10-12 for women, with weights that are heavy enough that you can just barely complete the set.  Do three sets for each exercise.  It's also most effective if you give your muscles time to recover in between workouts, exercising an area no more frequently than every other day.  That's why serious muscle-builders talk about doing a "leg day" or "upper body day."

Mind you, this is for increasing strength.  If your goal is to improve your heart and circulation, your endurance, etc. or to lose weight, then you want longer workouts with more sustainable intensity, such as swimming and running.  If for some reason you were to do such a workout using weights, you would then do lower weights and more repetitions, but that wouldn't increase your strength very efficiently.

Hmmmm ... the stuff I remember being about endurance is possible. Also, yes, classes at university level sounds like more reliable source

19 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

Since Sarah is trying to increase the strength of her magical muscles, my mind naturally goes to strength-building types of exercise.  What Pandora said about using the spell a few times a day, far enough apart that her own magic had built back up again, seems like working to the point of exhaustion to me.  :-)

I suspect that the metaphor wouldn't really be THAT fitting, considering this exercise simile. Note that Sarah don't really have any OTHER option than to "work" to the point of exhaustion - she is unable to conserve any of her own energy when casting the spell. But, yes, if the metaphor would be fitting, the "every other day" would point to bigger pauses being more effective.

13 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

19 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... which, to return to start of discussion, is why Pandora probably COULD've appear before Tedd even in his house without Edward not knowing.

What if Pandora wants Edward to THINK his less-than-perfect anti-magic household defenses are actually effective?  If she deliberately tripped the alarm when she appeared before Tedd or Edward in the house, they would think the alarms are effective.  Edward wouldn't spend time trying to improve the home protection system, and Pandora and her tools can continue to get in and out of the Verres' house at their convenience.

As far as Edward knows, she never tried to appear in the house.

But, yes: she may prefer to not appear before Tedd in the house to not draw attention to the fact the defenses are useless against immortals.

11 hours ago, ijuin said:

I think that Edward knows enough about Immortals that he is aware that they can mask their magical auras if they so wish. Pandora would register as a magically inactive entity until she started tossing spells around.

He might technically know but not realizing it until he have reason to think about it.

Also, she might register as a magically inactive entity even when tossing magic around because what she is doing are not really spells.