|
Post by Andrew on May 6, 2015 4:25:15 GMT
Botanical engineer, are you sure days are the same length for you and for us? In my world, different planets have different day lengths. Moreover, given that a rotating planet is not cause for alarm in our world, we probably have quite different “planets” too. For Daevinity, Nexus, and presumably several other worlds, the universe is (approximately) a large (perhaps infinite) expanse in three spatial dimensions, which is mostly empty (no air or anything else). Occasionally in this type of universe, there are galaxies, which are collections of stars. A star is giant ball of what can be simplified as fire, often with planets. A planet in this type of universe is a giant (but much smaller than a star) ball of rock or gas, with the rocky ones often surrounded by a gassy atmosphere, which goes in a circle around the parent sun and in turn often rotates itself. The Earth is such a ball of rock, with an atmosphere of breathable air and a bunch of water making oceans. People live on the surface of the Earth. They stay on because this type of universe has a force called gravity, which pushes things towards other things which are close, large, and heavy. Thus the people are pushed towards the Earth, which stays close to its star because of this same gravity (I’m not quite sure why it doesn’t fall in, but I could find out if you want).
This is true of the world in Daevinity I’m from. Hell works approximately the same, but starts completely empty and doesn’t even have the occasional star that wasn’t built by a demon. Heaven, Fairyland, and Limbo have gravity from some other principal; Fairyland and Limbo are infinite, approximately flat, planes of stuff (except that, as far as anybody can determine, you can dig infinitely far down), while Heaven is not mostly empty but instead filled with “cloud-fluff”, which is a neutral material angels can work from to change things.
Also, my estimate of 100 was an achievable high value. The average is between 70 and 80 for countries with high levels of technology, and less if there is less technology available.
|
|
|
Post by Fortunomancer on May 6, 2015 4:29:12 GMT
Botanical Engineer, I believe I misspoke. What I meant to say was that exiting Mysis' atmosphere would inevitably involve entering a space where it was impossible for life to thrive. Thus, we have not bothered looking beyond the atmosphere of Mysis, since we know that we will not find any living beings. That is why I was intrigued by your discussion of other planets.
|
|
|
Post by Andrew on May 6, 2015 4:30:57 GMT
Posting twice without somebody going in between is possible. This forum doesn’t have any etiquette about it yet, but I don’t want to assume there will be none. I tend to think it is fine if it makes things more readable. For example, the below post about my homeworld is unrelated to my comments to Biological engineer.
This post about my world is long; I will use headings and sub-headings. What everybody knowsI’m lead to believe this is relatively standard for 1995 Earths, so I’ll just provide highlights. Many of these points are in fact false, as explained later. Feel free to ask me anything about this, though. - There’s no such thing as magic. Practically nobody over the age of about 6 (years) believes in magic.
- Humans are the only known intelligent species. Some people believe there might be life on other planets, but nobody expects the answer to this question to have an actual impact on their life because if there is non-human intelligence, we can’t reach them and they haven’t contacted us.
- There are 5.7 billion people in the world
- The United States of America is a thing (I personally live in Washington State, in the city of Seattle)
- Salem is real, Gotham is not, Sunnydale is not.
What summoners knowAs with the above, some of this common knowledge is false. The secret informationMagic is real. Practically all summoners (which make up at most 200 people total and probably far fewer; many summoners think it might be only the dozen or so they personally know) have done some parlor tricks, but there usually isn’t any reason to do them. There are intelligent nonhuman beings with much more major magical powers. Collectively, these are called daeva. Individually, they have three types: demons, from Hell, who can create things; angels, from Heaven, who can change one thing into another if they know enough about the target form; and fairies, from Fairyland, who have high-power high-precision telekinesis. They are immortal, indestructible, and probably number far more than humans do. They can be “summoned”, wherein a human performs a ritual partially involving specific drawings. This is usually a bad idea, because a loose daeva of any kind on Earth could cause massive destruction: a demon could destroy the planet easily, an angel could destroy a city easily, and a fairy could destroy the building you’re in easily; with a bit more work any of them could probably destroy the planet or at least end human life. You can also summon a daeva with bindings. In this case, you include other drawings before you finish the summoning part of the ritual (or the daeva will get summoned when the summoning ritual is finished regardless of any bindings). Typical bindings are things like “don’t hurt anybody” and “stay in the area until there’s a Deal”. There is also sometimes the binding, especially with demons, of “say nothing, except for ‘Yes, summoner’ and ‘No, summoner’ in response to proposed deals”; this last binding specifically is called a gag. A Deal is where a summoner and a daeva agree on each doing something for the other. For example, a Deal might be that a fairy will turn a crank for an hour (which could be used to, e.g., generate electricity) in exchange for various material resources. Before a daeva has completed their end of a deal, or after they have been paid, they can be dismissed with a minute’s concentration. If they have completed their end of the deal but you have not yet pay them, they can harrass you until you do. The terms of a deal can be changed at any time if both parties agree; this can be used if you promise something in a deal but are then unable to deliver. Other than this deliberate dismissing on the part of the summoner, daeva only return home when the summoner dies. They cannot leave on their own. Most summoners do not trap daeva, even though they could, because taking a summons is voluntary. If davea might be trapped, they won’t take summonses. Additionally, there’s no particularly reason to trap daeva. Naturally, demons are hardest to pay. They don’t need material goods, and can get whatever they want fairly easily. There are three main types of payment for demons: information like lists of books and songs (so that they can then conjure the books or songs in question), sexual favors, and souls. Since summoners don’t want to give up their souls, and demons are supposed to be really persuasive, they are commonly gagged so that they can’t convince the summoner to do this. The daeva also have concordances between their worlds. I’m not sure how much most summoners know about these; I expect most don’t know much because they aren’t curious about them. Why it is secretThere are various reasons that summoners keep summoning secret. Some of them don’t want to bother making it public, some of them are afraid that if summoning is public people will carelessly start summoning unbound daeva, many of them are enjoying the economic benefits of having access to magic when others don’t. I’m not making it public because I don’t want to bother, I expect it would make other summoners mad at me (never a good idea), and it would be dangerous. I do enjoy economic benefits, but I expect I could continue enjoying most of those even if summoning were public. What I, Personally, KnowI am the unofficial inter-world newspaper editor. I try to get information between the daeva worlds, and I can attempt to contact humans when requested to do so. I try to keep an eye on what other summoners are doing, and try to give useful information to other summoners when I can, but most summoners don’t want to have regular correspondence with a summoner outside their group, so this isn’t as big a part of what I do. As I communicate between daeva like this, I get more information than most other summoners on how daeva work. The informationThere are a few things: - There are four concordant worlds: Heaven, Hell, Fairyland, and Limbo. Most summoners don’t know about limbo because, as far as anybody who does know about it can tell, you cannot summon to or from there. I regularly try, but have never succeeded.
- Limbo is the afterlife: humans go there when they die, and get the imortality and indestructibility of davea, but not the magic powers. This is why I am far more alarmed about the Nexus lifespan than the Daevinity one: effectively, the Daevinity lifespan is infinite.
- Sometimes, when they die, people instead become one of the three types of daeva. The going theory is that this happens to people who are summoners. Most daeva, however, are spontaneously occuring.
- Daeva, including demons, cannot perceive or affect souls. They have no reason to believe they are a real thing. They cannot take them in payment. When a Deal for a soul happens, the wording is that the demon may take the summoner’s soul. They then have permission, but not the ability.
Why it is secretThis information was told to me in confidence. I’m publishing it now because a demon said that I could, on this forum. I sometimes tell individual people about this when asked, such as when a newly-deceseased summoner wants to talk to their family. Otherwise, though, I have been asked to keep this secret whenever anybody has told me about it. I also think it’s best to keep some of it secret for other reasons: some summoners aren’t nice because power corrupts, and if they knew about Limbo they’d probably be even meaner, for example.
|
|
|
Post by Botanical Engineer on May 6, 2015 5:24:41 GMT
Andrew, I calculated the conversions from seconds, the smallest unit of time measurement. A second is about long enough to blink three times? Our days are definitely not the same length. Your universe sounds really complicated. What is the emptiness like? As far as we've been able to tell, the universe is a large maybe infinite three dimensional space filled with air. There are planets at different heights. Planets are cylindrical collections of soil, surrounded by a god of a similar shape but twice the size which produces light. Our planet's radius increases by about the length of an arm (I'd be surprised if we shared length units) every net, at midnight. Planets constantly move in one direction other than up or down. They do not collide. Down is a universal direction and everything is pulled that way in relation to how much stuff is in it. Do your planets have to spin really slowly to avoid people tripping from it even if they can't fall off? How is it ever night if the universe is full of stars? Does water come from anywhere but "oceans" and what happens when they get used up? Is there life besides fairies and spirits in Fairyland and Limbo? That sounds like about a cycle and 20, although it's late enough I'm not going to check the numbers for more precision right now. So you live a little longer than us but not a lot.
Fortunomancer, That makes sense. Especially if your universe is also full of emptiness and fire like Andrew's. It is hard to imagine anything growing in that. It seems very likely that there is other life in the universe because other planets are much like ours, so they might also generate life.
Andrew, again, How do demons conjure songs? I could see them making instruments, but songs seem more like an action than an object. Is it common enough for it to even be worth either the demon or the summoner to bother asking whether sexual favors can be the payment?
|
|
|
Post by Andrew on May 6, 2015 5:44:24 GMT
Botanical engineer, Your second seems about the same as ours. I’ve never been to the emptiness, but a few people have; they need to bring air with them because it’s impossible to breathe where there’s no air. Our planets do not spin particularly slowly, and I’m not sure why them spinning at different speeds would cause people to trip. Generally things stay at the same place relative to the surface of the planet. There are a lot of stars, but most of them are far enough away that they look like just tiny points of light. Whatever side of the planet is not facing the sun has night, where we see lots of these points of light but there is not enough light to really see by (unless the moon is bright on that particular night, but that’s a further complication). We have a lot of water on our planet, but as it generally flows “down” (towards the center of the planet), it collects in indentations (our planet is only an approximate sphere, not a perfect one). Given the amount of water we have, only the tallest parts of the rock actually poke out of the ocean, these are continents. Water leaves the oceans through a variety of processes, and we have smaller bodies of water like lakes, flowing water like rivers, and even floating water vapor called clouds. I’m not qualified to explain why clouds float instead of falling down to the surface of the planet like everything else (although sometimes water leaves the clouds and does fall down, as rain).
Fairyland has non-fairy flora and fauna, just like Earth does. Limbo is naturally empty, but when people die and go to limbo they each bring one “thing” with them (why different people get different things is not always clear, but there are some theories), and sometimes these are plants or nonsentient animals.
If your planets are surrounded by something light-producing, I don’t understand how you can ever have a night. Where does the increase in radius come from; does more stuff appear around the outside, or does everything get farther from the central axis, or what? Why do planets not fall down when everything else does?
EDIT TO ADD: I missed the question about demons. Starting about a hundred years ago we found ways to record sounds in a physical form, and then play them back from that form. The technology behind it has changed in various ways, but starting around then a demon could create a “record” of any song which had been recorded, given enough information to uniquely identify the record (like the singer, song name, and year of recording).
|
|
|
Post by Mother Starlight on May 6, 2015 5:45:19 GMT
I had sort of hoped that this board might be more organized than just throwing everything into a single general-purpose thread.
|
|
|
Post by Andrew on May 6, 2015 5:47:49 GMT
You’re right. I think we should maybe move to a single thread per world, or at least per type of world (like spherical-planet worlds).
|
|
|
Post by Leaf on May 6, 2015 13:26:56 GMT
I bet we're going to end up contrasting our various worlds' attributes no matter how hard we try to avoid it, so it might be a better idea to split up threads by type of world difference? For example, I am about to go make a thread about astrophysics.
|
|
|
Post by Mother Starlight on May 6, 2015 14:20:50 GMT
(Moved discussion about that thread to that thread itself.)
|
|
Cardea
Poster
words
Posts: 34
World: Adunka
Pronoun: she
|
Post by Cardea on May 6, 2015 16:00:42 GMT
we live 200 seasons. are two seasons: light and dark. is light season now. each season lasts a long time. I have 23 seasons. a home lasts about 50 seasons but there are always new homes.
|
|
|
Post by Archangel on May 6, 2015 23:13:15 GMT
I’m lead to believe this is relatively standard for 1995 Earths, so I’ll just provide highlights. Many of these points are in fact false. - There’s no such thing as magic. Practically nobody over the age of about 6 (years) believes in magic.
- Humans are the only known intelligent species. Some people believe there might be life on other planets, but nobody expects the answer to this question to have an actual impact on their life because if there is non-human intelligence, we can’t reach them and they haven’t contacted us.
- There are 5.7 billion people in the world
- The United States of America is a thing (I personally live in Washington State, in the city of Seattle)
- Salem is real, Gotham is not, Sunnydale is not.
This is all true of my Earth as of 1995. It's slightly later and the population is larger, but it's similar down to the level of having fictional cities named Gotham and Sunnydale. My world, which I'll call Keter for disambiguation, contains anomalies. Some are harmless and some are world-destroying, all are various levels of strange. Keeping this a secret is of the highest importance; when members of the public come into direct contact with the more hidden side of the world, nearly all cases end with us having to erase memories for the sake of their sanity. Even the safe anomalies would start people looking; they are humans after all. The Foundation exists to catalogue these anomalies, contain them, and prevent the astonishingly high proportion of destructive ones from removing our universe. You see why we take no chances with secrecy. If any future correspondents are from an early 21st-century Earth that they believe to contain no magic, you are probably not living in Keter. If you would like to verify this, PM me and we can work something out.
|
|
|
Post by Andrew on May 6, 2015 23:45:26 GMT
I think I wasn’t clear; I had never heard of Gotham or Sunnydale until I had seen a primer here on multiple worlds: Some features are more stable than others; if you're on an Earth, then you probably have a London and a Rome and a Tokyo, but you might or might not have a Gotham or a Salem or a Sunnydale. (Just to be clear, I have a London, a Rome, and a Tokyo too; now that I think about it I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of a daeva city named Sunnydale or Gotham, but I don’t think there are any on Earth). What makes you think any other humans from an early-21st-century Earth are unlikely to be from your world? Just the fact that we don’t seem to have any repeats so far with our relatively small sample size?
|
|
|
Post by Botanical Engineer on May 9, 2015 1:28:00 GMT
Dispersive Prism, I got my housemate to ask a scribe as a hypothetical edge case curiosity about a weird magic or medicine that made people live longer, and they said that it would probably be fine as long as it didn't affect people's patterns and didn't change them into different people and didn't give them other abilities against human nature. So if the blood magic you're researching does none of those things, it should be fine!
|
|
|
Post by Dispersive Prism on May 9, 2015 1:40:42 GMT
Okay! Experts in blood craft are really hard to find, though - I mean, not hard to find, but the ones I can find are very busy. I'll keep looking!
|
|
|
Post by Botanical Engineer on May 9, 2015 1:41:18 GMT
Okay, thank you!
|
|