Story Friday October 21, 2016

[Stature 96]

http://www.egscomics.com/?id=2265

Lo-jinks status activated. Body swapping is one the best spells around.

[chridd 31]

She's having doubts about whether it affects stuff in the real world, and she's complaining about using the body swap accidentally... what if bodies actually stay swapped once she ends the spell?

[exterminator 37]

I thought for a second that real-life Grace had felt time-stop Sarah nudging her hand.

[partner555 170]

23 minutes ago, exterminator said:

I thought for a second that real-life Grace had felt time-stop Sarah nudging her hand.

Me too.

[Scotty 1,061]

Sooo...I know that Amanda had stated that Sarah doesn't have to touch someone to body swap with them. But if that little nudge was all it took to trigger it, why didn't Sarah swap bodies with Carol when she ruffled he hair? With the case of Carol, Sarah had the intention of trying to move her, that's not the case with Grace. So did the nudge move Grace's hand enough to make the spell think Sarah wanted to swap with Grace? Like ruffling someone's hair is all well and good, but the moment you try to actually move someone, whether accidental or intentional, swapping bodies would make it easier? Seems more like an annoyance to me, and I'm sure Sarah would be annoyed from an artist's perspective if she wanted to fine tune a pose for whatever reason.

[mlooney 3,417]

6 hours ago, Scotty said:

Seems more like an annoyance to me, and I'm sure Sarah would be annoyed from an artist's perspective if she wanted to fine tune a pose for whatever reason.

She needs to test if wearing gloves stops the effect.  If it does, it's skin to skin contact, which ruffling hair may or may not result it. If it doesn't it's intent.   Or, as is often the case with magic in EGA EGS, it's what every is funnier.  We have already established that magic is a troll.   This have even been noticed in universe.

Edit.  It's a comic abbreviation, not an old school video card.

[StarCreator 2]

Well, this raises questions I didn't know I had.

Does she gain the abilities of the person she's swapped with? Like, is she able to transform like Grace can? Would she gain Tedd's magic insight if she swapped with him?

 

[Tom Sewell 268]

The joys of body-swapping have certainly generated a lot of plots and have definite potential for some pretty high jinks. And I'm wondering if Sarah having previously taken Grace's form might have something to do with a real body swap.

Of course, even higher jinks might come if she swaps with Tedd...

[Haylo 57]

3 hours ago, StarCreator said:

Well, this raises questions I didn't know I had.

Does she gain the abilities of the person she's swapped with? Like, is she able to transform like Grace can? Would she gain Tedd's magic insight if she swapped with him?

 

A magic simulation might very well simulate magic (or the related Uryuom Power) abilities. Grace would probably be fine with Sarah learning what it feels like to have her own shape-shifting ability, but does Sarah know and remember those clone forms Grace promised not to use?

[Cpt. Obvious 73]

7 hours ago, Scotty said:

Sooo...I know that Amanda had stated that Sarah doesn't have to touch someone to body swap with them. But if that little nudge was all it took to trigger it, why didn't Sarah swap bodies with Carol when she ruffled he hair? With the case of Carol, Sarah had the intention of trying to move her, that's not the case with Grace. So did the nudge move Grace's hand enough to make the spell think Sarah wanted to swap with Grace? Like ruffling someone's hair is all well and good, but the moment you try to actually move someone, whether accidental or intentional, swapping bodies would make it easier? Seems more like an annoyance to me, and I'm sure Sarah would be annoyed from an artist's perspective if she wanted to fine tune a pose for whatever reason.

OTT of course! Explains all... 

(yes, just kidding, mostly)
 

[hkmaly 490]

15 hours ago, chridd said:

She's having doubts about whether it affects stuff in the real world, and she's complaining about using the body swap accidentally... what if bodies actually stay swapped once she ends the spell?

Will not. Too late for that. From her perspective, she switched with Grace from the frozen moment, while Grace already spend several seconds being Grace since that.

10 hours ago, Scotty said:

Sooo...I know that Amanda had stated that Sarah doesn't have to touch someone to body swap with them. But if that little nudge was all it took to trigger it, why didn't Sarah swap bodies with Carol when she ruffled he hair? With the case of Carol, Sarah had the intention of trying to move her, that's not the case with Grace. So did the nudge move Grace's hand enough to make the spell think Sarah wanted to swap with Grace? Like ruffling someone's hair is all well and good, but the moment you try to actually move someone, whether accidental or intentional, swapping bodies would make it easier? Seems more like an annoyance to me, and I'm sure Sarah would be annoyed from an artist's perspective if she wanted to fine tune a pose for whatever reason.

I think that the more experience she will have, the more will intent matter. For now, the spell is new and ...

8 hours ago, mlooney said:

Or, as is often the case with magic in EGA EGS, it's what every is funnier.  We have already established that magic is a troll.   This have even been noticed in universe.

... and magic is trolling her with this effect, or perhaps she activates it because she's thinking about it because she fears it or something like that.

Or, maybe the thing she has talent for is the simulated body swap and the rest of simulation is just for supporting it?

7 hours ago, StarCreator said:

Well, this raises questions I didn't know I had.

Does she gain the abilities of the person she's swapped with? Like, is she able to transform like Grace can? Would she gain Tedd's magic insight if she swapped with him?

She certainly will be able to transform, but will it be (and feel like) Grace abilities or will it be her making changes in simulation? Will she have the abilities Grace has or the abilities she THINKS Grace has?

 

[Scotty 1,061]

51 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

16 hours ago, chridd said:

She's having doubts about whether it affects stuff in the real world, and she's complaining about using the body swap accidentally... what if bodies actually stay swapped once she ends the spell?

Will not. Too late for that. From her perspective, she switched with Grace from the frozen moment, while Grace already spend several seconds being Grace since that.

Yeah, she has doubts because this is her first actual spell and she only has the word of an Immortal on how it works. Of course said Immortal has vowed to do what she can to help Sarah keep that spell but she isn't really certain she should trust that either.

For us though, we've have Amanda and Lisa tell us that the simulation is only in Sarah's head and everyone outside isn't affected, it would have been evident after switching with Carol that Carol wasn't affected by it.

59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

She certainly will be able to transform, but will it be (and feel like) Grace abilities or will it be her making changes in simulation? Will she have the abilities Grace has or the abilities she THINKS Grace has?

If the simulation is anything like lucid dreaming, everything she tries to do, may just be an approximation based on what Sarah has seen. Grace's transformation looks the same as Elliot's transformations which looks and Sarah assumes feels like her transformations with the watches. She's seen Grace use telekinesis so she could probably do that in her simulation too. Sarah could very well do all of that without having to swap bodies.

[hkmaly 490]

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

Yeah, she has doubts because this is her first actual spell and she only has the word of an Immortal on how it works. Of course said Immortal has vowed to do what she can to help Sarah keep that spell but she isn't really certain she should trust that either.

The said immortal only vowed AFTER giving her that spell ...

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

For us though, we've have Amanda and Lisa tell us that the simulation is only in Sarah's head and everyone outside isn't affected, it would have been evident after switching with Carol that Carol wasn't affected by it.

Yes. We have big advantage of someone certainly more reliable than Pandora explaining it to us ...

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

She certainly will be able to transform, but will it be (and feel like) Grace abilities or will it be her making changes in simulation? Will she have the abilities Grace has or the abilities she THINKS Grace has?

If the simulation is anything like lucid dreaming, everything she tries to do, may just be an approximation based on what Sarah has seen. Grace's transformation looks the same as Elliot's transformations which looks and Sarah assumes feels like her transformations with the watches. She's seen Grace use telekinesis so she could probably do that in her simulation too. Sarah could very well do all of that without having to swap bodies.

It isn't exactly like lucid dreaming, as it keeps state ; in lucid dreaming, anything you don't remember and sometimes even thing you do remember disappears when you stop paying attention to it. (Also, it's hard enough to read in lucid dream at all, and completely impossible to read something you didn't read before.)

I see it like "she can certainly do it lucid-dreaming style but MAYBE she can do it in other way as well".

 

[Scotty 1,061]

14 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

It isn't exactly like lucid dreaming, as it keeps state ; in lucid dreaming, anything you don't remember and sometimes even thing you do remember disappears when you stop paying attention to it. (Also, it's hard enough to read in lucid dream at all, and completely impossible to read something you didn't read before.)

I see it like "she can certainly do it lucid-dreaming style but MAYBE she can do it in other way as well".

Well...true, but it kind of is similar. Like the reading example, sure in a dream it'd be impossible to pick up a random book you've never read before and read it properly, but for Sarah's simulation her imagination has the potential to change things. Like if someone told her that something happened in the book she's never read before, that knowledge would affect what she sees in the simulated book. Of course it's more likely something like that would happen if Sarah was told that just moments before going into the simulation, and be less and less likely if it she was told days, months, or years before.

The same goes with people abilities, she wouldn't actually be using Grace's abilities, just an approximation based on what she knows and seen.

[hkmaly 490]

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

Well...true, but it kind of is similar. Like the reading example, sure in a dream it'd be impossible to pick up a random book you've never read before and read it properly, but for Sarah's simulation her imagination has the potential to change things. Like if someone told her that something happened in the book she's never read before, that knowledge would affect what she sees in the simulated book.

Actually, no. The simulation only goes out of sync with reality when she actively tries to change it. Although, if she would for example use "reality warping" to find the correct page of book, that would certainly add the section even if it wasn't there before.

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

The same goes with people abilities, she wouldn't actually be using Grace's abilities, just an approximation based on what she knows and seen.

As I said: if the simulation spell have some way to grant her other people abilities, it would take precedence. But if it doesn't (and we really don't know that yet), then she can "simulate" those abilities with "reality warping", and then it will be just approximation. And, of course, without Tedd confirming how it works - or without her comparing her experience with Grace and finding it doesn't match some new information Grace tell her - she would have no way to find out which of those two happened.

[Aura Guardian 57]

20 hours ago, chridd said:

She's having doubts about whether it affects stuff in the real world, and she's complaining about using the body swap accidentally... what if bodies actually stay swapped once she ends the spell?

Ever hear of Capiorcorpus/Corpsetaker of the Dresden Files? By which I mean, please don't give Dan that idea, though admittedly it would go against who Sarah is, so, we're safe and she won't get such a villain spell as that.

[Don Edwards 548]

12 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

The joys of body-swapping have certainly generated a lot of plots and have definite potential for some pretty high jinks. And I'm wondering if Sarah having previously taken Grace's form might have something to do with a real body swap.

Of course, even higher jinks might come if she swaps with Tedd...

If she swaps with Tedd and it turns out she acquires the abilities of the person she swaps with, it could be useful - she could use Tedd's ability on her spell from the inside, while Tedd's using the same ability on the same spell from the outside.

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

I wonder if she'll come out of her simulation to discover that Tedd could see what she was doing?  Wouldn't Pandora be jealous!

[chridd 31]

2 hours ago, Aura Guardian said:

Ever hear of Capiorcorpus/Corpsetaker of the Dresden Files? By which I mean, please don't give Dan that idea, though admittedly it would go against who Sarah is, so, we're safe and she won't get such a villain spell as that.

No, I haven't.  I don't see how it would necessarily be a villain spell (though one could of course do villainous things with that), at least if it's actual switching as opposed to a one-way thing.  It would be similar to something she can already do less efficiently with the transformation gun (although it would make it possible for her to hurt the other person's body by hurting herself, though that works both ways), or if she also gains the person's powers it would be similar to (and less powerful than) being a wizard (though it would have the additional power of preventing the target from using their normal powers).  Unless she can switch with immortals...

In any case, I don't really think it's likely, given what's established (Pandora might have avoided mentioning it in order to cause chaos and reveal magic more, but since now she has a good reason to hide magic, she probably would have mentioned it), but the fact that she was saying what she did sort of seemed to me like it was leading there.  Now that

15 hours ago, StarCreator said:

Does she gain the abilities of the person she's swapped with? Like, is she able to transform like Grace can? Would she gain Tedd's magic insight if she swapped with him?

has been mentioned, that seems like a more likely twist (if there's going to be a twist at all), especially since she's now around two people with powers whereas the first time she tried it she only switched with Carol, who as far as we know doesn't have any sort of magic powers.  And I seem to remember her mentioning that switching bodies was the best way to check for a magic mark, which would be especially true if this were the case...

[banneret 45]

As the swap takes place in the context of the simulation, she would do well to investigate the extent of the simulation. Of course checking whether powers persist and she can use them is worthwhile and has comedic potential, but I'm more interested in Sarah potentially inhabiting Tedd and getting a sense of emotional state, as reflected by physical responses - is Tedd tense across the shoulders, covered in gooseflesh, slightly chilled? What is the resolution of detail that Sarah can reproduce without awareness of it, and what - if any - distortion does she bring to the simulation with her preconceptions?

Of course, I feel that "checking for a magic mark" during a switch is adequately and humorously handled by looking at the inhabited body in the simulation.

[malloyd 23]

13 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Actually, no. The simulation only goes out of sync with reality when she actively tries to change it. Although, if she would for example use "reality warping" to find the correct page of book, that would certainly add the section even if it wasn't there before.

It's hard to guess what this spell might do.  It feels like there must be more to it than we've yet heard.  If not Dan described it horribly - starting from the central concept of it having anything at all to do with "time".  I mean "takes a mental photo of your surroundings, lets you look at details, moving yourself and them around if you like, and gives you photo editing tools if you want, which are pretty useless but make it a really cool toy" covers everything it's definitely said to do.  The only time effect is "subjectively feels like you have longer to look at/play with it than actually passes while you do".

 

[chridd 31]

3 hours ago, malloyd said:

It's hard to guess what this spell might do.  It feels like there must be more to it than we've yet heard.  If not Dan described it horribly - starting from the central concept of it having anything at all to do with "time".  I mean "takes a mental photo of your surroundings, lets you look at details, moving yourself and them around if you like, and gives you photo editing tools if you want, which are pretty useless but make it a really cool toy" covers everything it's definitely said to do.  The only time effect is "subjectively feels like you have longer to look at/play with it than actually passes while you do".

There's also the effect that nothing in the simulation continues to move (on its own, at least), which makes it seem like a time stop ability (and thus time-related) to someone who uses it but who doesn't know what it actually did (which includes Sarah the first time she used it—and of course the reader was seeing things from Sarah's perspective at first and therefore didn't know what it did either).

[hkmaly 490]

8 hours ago, chridd said:

12 hours ago, malloyd said:

It's hard to guess what this spell might do.  It feels like there must be more to it than we've yet heard.  If not Dan described it horribly - starting from the central concept of it having anything at all to do with "time".  I mean "takes a mental photo of your surroundings, lets you look at details, moving yourself and them around if you like, and gives you photo editing tools if you want, which are pretty useless but make it a really cool toy" covers everything it's definitely said to do.  The only time effect is "subjectively feels like you have longer to look at/play with it than actually passes while you do".

There's also the effect that nothing in the simulation continues to move (on its own, at least), which makes it seem like a time stop ability (and thus time-related) to someone who uses it but who doesn't know what it actually did (which includes Sarah the first time she used it—and of course the reader was seeing things from Sarah's perspective at first and therefore didn't know what it did either).

I like the term "snapshot".

Didn't Dan almost celebrated when someone on twitter used some term which described it better that he originally did? Hmmmm ... I can't find any trace of it in commentary ... maybe not.

[ijuin 572]

On 10/22/2016 at 9:54 AM, malloyd said:

 I mean "takes a mental photo of your surroundings, lets you look at details, moving yourself and them around if you like, and gives you photo editing tools if you want, which are pretty useless but make it a really cool toy" covers everything it's definitely said to do.

The part that makes it more than just "a really cool toy" is that it is, at the moment of casting, a highly accurate snapshot which even includes information that the caster has no way of knowing before casting (e.g. what's inside hidden spaces or otherwise hidden from view). Sarah can pick up a document and read its contents, even if she did not know what the contents were, and what she reads would be an accurate reproduction of the original document. She can also bypass any locks or security measures within the snapshot that might keep her from reading the document. This is what makes it a valuable spying tool.

[Scotty 1,061]

34 minutes ago, ijuin said:

The part that makes it more than just "a really cool toy" is that it is, at the moment of casting, a highly accurate snapshot which even includes information that the caster has no way of knowing before casting (e.g. what's inside hidden spaces or otherwise hidden from view). Sarah can pick up a document and read its contents, even if she did not know what the contents were, and what she reads would be an accurate reproduction of the original document. She can also bypass any locks or security measures within the snapshot that might keep her from reading the document. This is what makes it a valuable spying tool.

As long as she's able to keep herself from expecting to find something. Like Pandora said, if Sarah lifted up someone's shirt expecting to find a magic mark, then there's a good chance her imagination will put a mark there whether there actually is one or not, same goes with documents, if she sees a book she's never read before, but someone already told her the ending of it, if she ever imagined how it might have got to that conclusion, it could affected what she saw in the book. It'd be just like the body swapping, Sarah would need to learn to discipline herself to keep her mind from wandering when trying to do things in the simulated space.