This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
"You know, I actually think that having weapons that could wipe Angband off the map would make him easier to deal with. He lashes out when he's hurt, not when he's strong. It's why I'm more comfortable with the realization they're positioned to learn so fast and so much."
purposeful_glory
"Great. So all we have to do is make him the sole nuclear power on the planet and all will be well."
purposeful_glory
"Having lots of those things around is a recipe for everybody setting theirs up to automatically retaliate if they are wiped off the map so nobody twitches first. Sometimes somebody twitches."
"Right. Hmm.
The way to do retroactive memory would be sort of related to the way you make your illusions something that generates the right impression in your head, building from your memories a map of what could have generated that in your head and then checking it against reality and making reality available. It isn't impossible, but it would be quite a project."
The way to do retroactive memory would be sort of related to the way you make your illusions something that generates the right impression in your head, building from your memories a map of what could have generated that in your head and then checking it against reality and making reality available. It isn't impossible, but it would be quite a project."
purposeful_glory
"And reality about the contents of books I read ages ago is most probably in another reality altogether, assuming Melian's right that it was very definitely empty here when Eru started his project. Not a very local effect."
He frowns. "No. Though even if only worked for people in this reality, it'd be a useful song to have. Has Macalaurë looked at something that'd let you see through hallucinations?"
purposeful_glory
"He mentioned a true seeing spell in the works, nothing for hallucinations, I'm not sure how that would help unless someone knew it had been cast on them before they were captured anyway."
"That's who it'd help. If we did it for everyone the Enemy couldn't pull off that specific thing ever again."
purposeful_glory
"Yeah. If it lasted long enough. I'd have to put it on either a thing or the person themselves and if the former the thing could be broken and if the latter they'd have to listen to it all the time."
"No, the Enemy couldn't fake the sound because the sound is the effect. Once they'd heard it enough to know it, then once it was played they'd know they weren't hallucinating."
purposeful_glory
"I thought he had general sensory input control? He can't fake a sound that isn't happening? I mean, if nothing else he can time-dilate, right, if I speed them up too much they stop working."
"Isn't your illusion faking a sound that isn't happening? I'm not sure there's a way to cause someone to hear a sound without the sound existing in the relevant sense. The time thing is a problem.
What do you remember about bombs that could level Angband?"
What do you remember about bombs that could level Angband?"
purposeful_glory
"It's a sound that isn't happening in a certain sense. It can be heard and that is all; I can't make it loud enough to knock a building over, I can't resonate it just so to shatter a glass; I could make things sound normal underwater even though normally they wouldn't, I could make illusion sound in vacuum where normally it has nothing to propagate through. The general category of bombs - there's so many kinds, but the basic idea involves, were you paying attention to my chemistry lecture?"
purposeful_glory
"So, you take an atom, and you break it. Or you take two, and you force them to get real cozy and be one atom. And then you level Angband." Pause. "Depending on where I went to go Angband-leveling-items-shopping I might come back with antimatter instead, in some decorously small quantity that would only level Angband and not annihilate half the planet. Antimatter is like matter, but backwards, so if they touch both of them cease to exist very violently."
"... I actually would entirely trust my dear uncle with that. It is not his style to use that kind of thing in random anger."
purposeful_glory
"He might be able to get somewhere with just what I could tell him now but it requires a lot of things I don't remember, including metals that are, let's call it poisonous, to be near."
"...that's a thing the Silmarils can do. Poisonous metals, I mean, they were present even in Valinor and Aulë would teach advanced students of geology about them and in the presence of the Silmarils they don't do the thing that makes them poisonous. I don't know what that means for your bombs."
purposeful_glory
"Well, it probably means you can't construct them the way I've read about in the presence of a Silmaril but would be well advised to have one handy in case you had a lab accident. But the Silmarils are behind this fortress which is as yet tragically unleveled."
purposeful_glory
"The smushing-atoms-together kind might, the taking-one-apart kind probably not. Actually, I'm not sure you need any of the poisonous metals for the smushing variety, I could be misremembering, but there's some reason they're harder to invent."
purposeful_glory
"Yeah. I could more readily answer the questions of whether poisonous metals must actively poison in order to serve as this sort of weapon if I remembered all the books I've ever read."
"I'll give it a try. And if we could give people back memories this way that have been tampered with -"