Story Monday October 10, 2016

[hkmaly 490]

9 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

21 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Imagine magic more like mud or honey. You CAN make hole in those temporary. And if you make such hole near the dam, you can free it without consuming all of the gigantic amount of energy in Moperville.

Would that negate the explosive nature of bursting the dam or just delay it?

Maybe it will negate the explosive effect. Maybe it will just give the wizard enough time to get to safety.

11 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

But Sarah will build up her own supply of energy which will enable more useful casts as time progresses.

We are talking about Sarah. She would SURELY cast the spell the recommended times per day anyway to get the maximum effect on her own supply. Meaning, THAT is what we are comparing it to, and compared to that, helping Pandora would SLOW DOWN the build up of her own supply. (Or, at least, wouldn't help.)

14 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

25 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

She will probably do what she can, but not even Pandora is able to awaken someone who is too far from awakening.

Agreed.  The key is defining what "too far away" is for an Immortal that is very far past needing a reset.

I'm sure one day at half recommended training and one day at rapid casting will NOT be enough. Unless there will be some sort of short timeskip implying Sarah was doing what she can for week or something like that ...

... which reminds me: Guardian forms. Sure, they are way too situational, but with the vampires raining hell, that's a VERY GOOD opportunity for flying around a lot. Remember that last time Nanase and Ellen stopped at only single apartment just because they didn't NEED more. I'm sure with the ambient energy, they could fly more and consume more.

17 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

Sarah has already been doing this.  Switching rulesets might be a pain for Magic to do.  If Sarah's role in saving it a lot of time and trouble is pivotal enough, Magic itself might just power Sarah up.  But that's merely speculation.

... that MIGHT work.

17 minutes ago, Vorlonagent said:

29 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Or ... do they still have Dex medallion?

I'm not sure giving Voltaire a free shot at manipulating Sarah is all that good an idea.  I THINK Adrian Raven has it, but I don't remember what happened to it.

DEX is open to suggestion when pumped with magic. It was clearly said that different people reacts on magic differently. Sarah is probably safe, and there is certainly way to test it before she starts using it a lot.

Waaaaaaait ... it's not Adrian Raven. Grace got it. And while she presumably intended to give it to Edward, if she was as careful with it as Edward was with checking if Justin is awakened, she may still have it.

[Scotty 1,061]

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

... which reminds me: Guardian forms. Sure, they are way too situational, but with the vampires raining hell, that's a VERY GOOD opportunity for flying around a lot. Remember that last time Nanase and Ellen stopped at only single apartment just because they didn't NEED more. I'm sure with the ambient energy, they could fly more and consume more.

From what Dan said about guardian forms in the commentary, they wouldn't likely burn through enough energy to help Sarah. Not_Tengu was the one that was really using up energy around Rhea and Charlotte's apartment, from using it to accelerate the effect of his enchantment on the punch to transform the college students and putting a mind control spell on them, to drawing more power to make himself faster and stronger while chasing Ellen and Nanase. Yes they did take advantage of the excess energy to make their forms last a little longer but it wouldn't have taken much, and they only depleted the energy around the apartment, I would imagine for Pandora's plan to work, Sarah would need to take even larger chomps out than what Not_Tengu did.

 

[The Old Hack 2,448]

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

(Note for The Old Hack: I know I used the word trains but there is no railroad involved.)

Awwww

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

So if Sarah does manage to build up her personal magic capacity enough to be able to cast that spell on her own, she'll be quite powerful as magic users go!  Makes me wonder what spells she might get if she Awakens.

Hmm, Pandora did say that usually Sarah would get enough magic to cast the spell herself before Awakening, but that she might not do things in that order.  Perhaps that was setting up the idea that, at the end of chomping up the excess magic, Sarah will have built up enough magic to Awaken, even though she won't be able to cast that particular spell until she builds up her magic further by casting whatever new spell she gets when she Awakens.

[mlooney 3,417]

6 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

Considering what Sarah is doing, she'll be a prime candidate for an Awakening once she's done her part to make for a safe dam-busting.

Is she going to be mounted in a special device and given a backwards spin?

[RainbowWizard 35]

I really like the idea of sufficiently powerful 'chomps' at magic lowering the water level. It makes magic a bit more reasonable to think about, like thaumic particles you can drain energy from, and potentially split to create e magical equivalent of nuclear energy.

 

Course, with this dam analogy, what you need is to make it a proper dam. With holes for magic to run through back to ifs natural course to go out to sea with metaphorical turbines within that power up your generators with regular energy... Can you stick a turbine in a fundamental concept of reality? 

 

Either way, cheap electricity if you can finagle a generator to be run off magic.

 

Speculaton below is mostly nonsense:

Maybe if you turned Moperville into a big road bypass, and shaped the motorway roads so they were a runic array designed to spin magic as it enters the system, then use a modified dreamcatcher footpath shape to filter magic... Nah, too much would be kept, and you've got puddles of angry magic in the area. You need to funnel it, and it's in such a big area... And the rune and dreamcatcher might have the chance of manifesting spiritual entities naturally, leading to another Hellouth scenario. Maybe if you split magic through Dewitchery prisms, you could control it in manageable chunks to disappate into drivers going elsewhere?

 

I'm sure the main cast would hate their homes being destroyed for a road bypass. Shame, the world needs bypasss, they gotta be built somewhere.

 

Okay. What they need is a Disneyland. That kind of place is a beacon for magical and weird stuff, and it drains off the local magic enough to safely 'earth' it...

[Scotty 1,061]

8 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

So if Sarah does manage to build up her personal magic capacity enough to be able to cast that spell on her own, she'll be quite powerful as magic users go!  Makes me wonder what spells she might get if she Awakens.

Hmm, Pandora did say that usually Sarah would get enough magic to cast the spell herself before Awakening, but that she might not do things in that order.  Perhaps that was setting up the idea that, at the end of chomping up the excess magic, Sarah will have built up enough magic to Awaken, even though she won't be able to cast that particular spell until she builds up her magic further by casting whatever new spell she gets when she Awakens.

Thing is, Sarah's so far used her spell twice, using it another 3-4 times is probably not going to build up her magic capacity by much if any, it might take a few days worth of casting like that to do anything. Pandora wants Sarah to help because she hasn't spent any actually time practicing her spell beyond the initial two casts and so her spell would draw pretty much 98% of it's energy from the environment. If by chance, the first 3-4 times she uses the spell to drain the area of energy does increase her capacity a bit, it wouldn't likely be noticeable until she goes to sleep or something and is allowed to recharge but something tells me that Pandora would like this to happen in 1 day so that it doesn't give the ambient energy a chanc to fill in the gaps.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

Well, this is an area where my "building muscles" analogy may break down.  Pandora said that using the spell without enough break between castings wouldn't do much, not anything, so it might be that even when the environmental magic does 98% of the work, Sarah stll gets a 2% workout.  (Or 99.9% vs 0.1%, whatever you think is appropriate.)  So, normally she would want to cast the spell well-spaced to exercise her full capacity.  But, if Sarah were to cast the spell a hundred times, or a thousand, all those small percentages could add up to expanding her capacity.

Hmm, perhaps there is a muscle analogy -- physical therapy often uses "passive range of motion" exercises to keep temporarily paralyzed or weakened muscles from deteriorating from disuse.  Atrophy sets in if muscles aren't used.  Perhaps Sarah's magic is like a limb that she can't use normally, but PROM exercises would stimulate her "magic muscles" just enough to help them start working more easily and effectively on their own.  Not a perfect analogy, but it kinda works.  :-)

Either way, I suspect Pandora will promise Sarah she'll help her Awaken if at all possible once the job is done.  Whether that involves power sources like the gauntlet or amulet, or helping her find pockets of magic to exploit ("puddles" left behind, if you will), or somehow directly boosting her power, I don't know.  Pandora may need to provide such a boost in order to get the job done in the first place, depending on whether some small ignition spark of Sarah's innate magic is needed to start casting the spell even with the huge environmental reservoir to do the real work.

I'm betting half my quatloos that Sarah ends up with magic in the end, one way or another. :-D

[JustBecauseICantDraw 200]

Quote

Course, with this dam analogy, what you need is to make it a proper dam. With holes for magic to run through back to ifs natural course to go out to sea with metaphorical turbines within that power up your generators with regular energy... Can you stick a turbine in a fundamental concept of reality?

Well, you could stick a person with a telekinesis spell in the magic dam, have them lift water, and have the water falling back down drive a traditional turbine.  It is _possible_. The next question is how many steps you can simplify or remove.

[JustBecauseICantDraw 200]

If Sarah still needs to cast her spell after this, and can't, then she now has the one piece of information she needs that everyone else is missing.

She knows there is a steady stream of magic somewhere in moperville. All she has to do is wander around trying to cast spells until she finds it.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

48 minutes ago, JustBecauseICantDraw said:

If Sarah still needs to cast her spell after this, and can't, then she now has the one piece of information she needs that everyone else is missing.

She knows there is a steady stream of magic somewhere in moperville. All she has to do is wander around trying to cast spells until she finds it.

Um. How do you figure? I visualised Moperville as being a funnel for magic flowing in from everywhere else -- like an indentation in the terrain, as it were -- and the clog as being a blockage that kept magic from dropping out through the bottom of the funnel. When was a specific source of magic mentioned?

[Scotty 1,061]

Just now, The Old Hack said:

Um. How do you figure? I visualised Moperville as being a funnel for magic flowing in from everywhere else -- like an indentation in the terrain, as it were -- and the clog as being a blockage that kept magic from dropping out through the bottom of the funnel. When was a specific source of magic mentioned?

Yeah, magic would be coming in from all directions, I guess it might be possible that if she stood at the exact spot that magic drained into the other half of the world, she might be able to siphon some energy from it, though if that spot happens to be up in the air...

[Vorlonagent 442]

2 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Um. How do you figure? I visualised Moperville as being a funnel for magic flowing in from everywhere else -- like an indentation in the terrain, as it were -- and the clog as being a blockage that kept magic from dropping out through the bottom of the funnel. When was a specific source of magic mentioned?

What I envisioned was magic having currents from points where it enters the world and points where it leaves, so moperville's exit point has magic flowing to it from all over the midwestern US.  That current is apparently intact even with a dam in the way.

[hkmaly 490]

18 hours ago, Scotty said:

20 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... which reminds me: Guardian forms. Sure, they are way too situational, but with the vampires raining hell, that's a VERY GOOD opportunity for flying around a lot. Remember that last time Nanase and Ellen stopped at only single apartment just because they didn't NEED more. I'm sure with the ambient energy, they could fly more and consume more.

From what Dan said about guardian forms in the commentary, they wouldn't likely burn through enough energy to help Sarah. Not_Tengu was the one that was really using up energy around Rhea and Charlotte's apartment, from using it to accelerate the effect of his enchantment on the punch to transform the college students and putting a mind control spell on them, to drawing more power to make himself faster and stronger while chasing Ellen and Nanase. Yes they did take advantage of the excess energy to make their forms last a little longer but it wouldn't have taken much, and they only depleted the energy around the apartment, I would imagine for Pandora's plan to work, Sarah would need to take even larger chomps out than what Not_Tengu did.

Not Tengu knew that guardian forms are limited time, yet he didn't have any concern with how much will HIS form last ...

I still think that the guardian forms WOULD be able to make pretty big holes. Like, not as big as Sarah spamming her spell but enough to be worth to try considering they need to consume as much energy as fast as possible ...

18 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

Perhaps that was setting up the idea that, at the end of chomping up the excess magic, Sarah will have built up enough magic to Awaken, even though she won't be able to cast that particular spell until she builds up her magic further by casting whatever new spell she gets when she Awakens.

Hmmm ... considering that Pandora might be able to help with awakening but not magic capacity, sounds very likely.

7 hours ago, JustBecauseICantDraw said:

Quote

Course, with this dam analogy, what you need is to make it a proper dam. With holes for magic to run through back to ifs natural course to go out to sea with metaphorical turbines within that power up your generators with regular energy... Can you stick a turbine in a fundamental concept of reality?

Well, you could stick a person with a telekinesis spell in the magic dam, have them lift water, and have the water falling back down drive a traditional turbine.  It is _possible_. The next question is how many steps you can simplify or remove.

The person. I would assume you can enchant some pipes to form Escher's waterfall and put the turbine into that. But note that turbine is not the most effective way to produce energy, there may be something better, more direct.

Wait ... Tedd WAS doing some experiments with free energy generators, didn't he? But I think it didn't worked ...

 

[Scotty 1,061]

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Not Tengu knew that guardian forms are limited time, yet he didn't have any concern with how much will HIS form last ...

Not_Tengu didn't know that his magic was being augmented by the ambient energy, he believed he was given a gift, that he was drawn to Moperville by some divine purpose to recreate his flock.

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Wait ... Tedd WAS doing some experiments with free energy generators, didn't he? But I think it didn't worked ...

He was trying to create electricity using a potato.

[hkmaly 490]

28 minutes ago, Scotty said:

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Not Tengu knew that guardian forms are limited time, yet he didn't have any concern with how much will HIS form last ...

Not_Tengu didn't know that his magic was being augmented by the ambient energy, he believed he was given a gift, that he was drawn to Moperville by some divine purpose to recreate his flock.

I would still say that if his form would usually be limited time, he would be more careful. On the other hand, his NORMAL monster form likely consumed less energy than after the power boost ...

32 minutes ago, Scotty said:

3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Wait ... Tedd WAS doing some experiments with free energy generators, didn't he? But I think it didn't worked ...

He was trying to create electricity using a potato.

That doesn't mean there was no magic involved.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

He was trying to create electricity using a potato.

His mistake. He should have tried with lemons.

[Scotty 1,061]

15 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

His mistake. He should have tried with lemons.

No! We do not want Tedd making combustible lemons!

[Don Edwards 548]

It's a fairly common thing in magic systems that even if the energy that powers the spell doesn't come from the mage, the energy to shape the spell does.

Think of cowboys directing a stampeding herd of cattle. The herd, collectively, clearly has much more energy than the cowboys and their horses, but the latter have to expend their own energy in attempting to get them under control. That's only one of gazillions of real-world examples of how it takes energy to control energy.

So even if Sarah relies entirely on ambient energy to power her spell, she probably has to use some of her own to shape that power.

[Scotty 1,061]

16 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

It's a fairly common thing in magic systems that even if the energy that powers the spell doesn't come from the mage, the energy to shape the spell does.

Think of cowboys directing a stampeding herd of cattle. The herd, collectively, clearly has much more energy than the cowboys and their horses, but the latter have to expend their own energy in attempting to get them under control. That's only one of gazillions of real-world examples of how it takes energy to control energy.

So even if Sarah relies entirely on ambient energy to power her spell, she probably has to use some of her own to shape that power.

But that kinda falls apart with the fact that Sarah could use the spell all day, but only 3-4 times would actually be of any benefit to exercising her magic. It's like for the first few casts, she uses a bit of her energy as well as ambient energy, but then after that she casts using pure ambient energy.

[TehEpicDuckeh 3]

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

No! We do not want Tedd making combustible lemons!

Grenada!

*faraway*

*BOOSH* "AAH THERE'S LEMON JUICE IN ALL OF MY EYES AGHHH!"

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

10 hours ago, Scotty said:

But that kinda falls apart with the fact that Sarah could use the spell all day, but only 3-4 times would actually be of any benefit to exercising her magic. It's like for the first few casts, she uses a bit of her energy as well as ambient energy, but then after that she casts using pure ambient energy.

Again, Pandora said that too-frequent casting wouldn't do much to expand her power, not that it wouldn't do anything!  This implied that there is some small effect.  Only question is, how small?

[Cpt. Obvious 73]

On den 11 oktober 2016 at 5:51 AM, The Old Hack said:

Awwww

But a train doesn't have to have to run on rails...

Some of them doesn't even need roads. Though the really large ones does...
 

[Stature 96]

1 hour ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

But a train doesn't have to have to run on rails...

Some of them doesn't even need roads. Though the really large ones does...

Tram, I say, is a cross; they still do as they run on rubber automotive wheels; see #0.

14 hours ago, Scotty said:

He was trying to create electricity using a potato.

Saltwater is better.

13 hours ago, Scotty said:

No! We do not want Tedd making combustible lemons!

Who says they were combustible? They are for the makeshift batteries since someone detonated a combustible orange.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

2 hours ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

 Though the really large ones does...
 

That depends on whether it is Heterodyne-built.