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Here is a demon. The demon is in his swimming pool.
He doesn't swim naked, so he takes the summon anyway.
demon cam vs the clam planet
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from_scratch
In all of the Enemy ships currently being spied on, the main topic of discussion is the sudden inexplicable ability of the [likely profane collective noun] to make things appear out of thin air, how worrying this is, and how the [likely profane collective noun] must be destroyed as expeditiously as possible before they escape this [location not fully clear from context].
slash-of-gold
"I think so too," Azair says dryly. "And here I thought it would be hard for them to get much more aggressive than they already were..."
from_scratch
"Yeah. How long do I have to try to get more language and try talking to them before they can launch Genocide Attempt Of The Day, what's their scramble capacity?"
from_scratch
"Well, that's not nothing." Process faster, li'l computer. "Unfortunately they're not giving me really good samples and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to try anything more sophisticated than 'stop or be destroyed', which was not what I was going for here."
from_scratch
"Yes, but I was hoping for something along the lines of 'your opponents have recently befriended superior firepower, reconsider diplomacy'. If they utter the word for diplomacy in the next few hours I will eat that Roomba."
from_scratch
"Yeah. The good news is that they are literally close enough to see, as opposed to millions of miles away, and I can just disintegrate them at once when I'm ready to give up on them. I'm holding out a sliver of hope that they just really wanted to harvest the shell of your weird clam planet and could be appeased with weird clam planet bits made by yours truly, though."
slash-of-gold
"It seems unlikely, but I can understand why you might be reluctant to skip to the disintegration."
from_scratch
"Yeah." Cam looks at accumulating language data. "How sure are you that nobody provoked them?"
slash-of-gold
"They came down out of the sky and started killing people. It's hard to imagine a commensurate provocation, or how someone might have delivered one before they made themselves known."
from_scratch
"Even non-commensurate. I'm not saying they're reasonable, I'm wondering if they could maybe be made to go away with an apology instead of a disintegration. You weren't sending messages into space, they definitely didn't send visitors who were treated rudely by random people who thought they were ugly, there didn't use to be an extra layer of planet that somebody wrecked thereby leaving them homeless, anything?"
slash-of-gold
"It stretches credibility to think something like that could have happened. It's hard to say for sure that it didn't - well, I expect someone would know if there had been an extra layer of planet within anything like recent history. But if there was a peaceful first visit, or any communication whatsoever, I've never heard tell of it."
from_scratch
Nod.
Cam looks at his vocabulary. What high-confidence words can he assemble, how close can he get to the diplomacy thing? Does he even have "talk" or "communicate"?
Cam looks at his vocabulary. What high-confidence words can he assemble, how close can he get to the diplomacy thing? Does he even have "talk" or "communicate"?
He could assemble "stop or be destroyed" with reasonably high confidence. He has "escape" and "kill" and the vocabulary they're using to talk about his conjuration and a whole lot of almost-certainly-swear-words, and... yes, there it goes, they've discussed communicating with each other often enough now that the software is reasonably confident about "speak".
Depending on what tradeoffs he wants to make about certainty and exact semantic content, he has several options, but one of the most high-confidence strings he can put together is "Speak to me; I am frighteningly powerful."
Depending on what tradeoffs he wants to make about certainty and exact semantic content, he has several options, but one of the most high-confidence strings he can put together is "Speak to me; I am frighteningly powerful."
from_scratch
"I can assemble what is probably 'speak to me, I am frighteningly powerful'."
from_scratch
"Why thank you."
He follows a transponder in one of the little mics to make a speaker.
It utters this sentence.
He follows a transponder in one of the little mics to make a speaker.
It utters this sentence.
...
Everyone present near that mic freaks the fuck out.
"The [profane noun] can speak! The object-creating [profane noun] has followed us! DESTROY IT! DESTROY IT!"
They don't even bother evacuating this ship; it self-destructs with the full crew still aboard, waiting only long enough to flash lights at its neighbours and communicate the problem. They scatter further.
Everyone present near that mic freaks the fuck out.
"The [profane noun] can speak! The object-creating [profane noun] has followed us! DESTROY IT! DESTROY IT!"
They don't even bother evacuating this ship; it self-destructs with the full crew still aboard, waiting only long enough to flash lights at its neighbours and communicate the problem. They scatter further.
from_scratch
"...You know what, I have very few reservations about prompting them to self-destruct ships that they themselves choose not to evacuate," Cam remarks.
More speakers. More utterances.
More speakers. More utterances.
More flashing lights. More self-destructing ships.
from_scratch
"I have this extremely immature urge to see if I can get all of them to blow themselves up. Is there air up there? Or, rather, weird physics - does sound work up there outside of the ships?"