call me maybe [Connecticut Yankee] | Glowfic Constellation

from_scratch

"Yeah, the phone option was going to involve having candidates take selfies and record speeches."

connecticut_yankee

"Maybe we could still do that. Trusting a new machine to tell you who rules the country is one thing, but you don't need to trust it quite that far to take a picture. And if it biases the election in favor of people better able to use new technology, I think I can live with that.

The hard part is arranging for everyone to get a phone. If they fall from the sky, that almost certainly does not happen. Even if we send agents through every town handing them out, many people wouldn't bother taking one."

from_scratch

"I can't put them inside everybody's house unless you know in considerable detail where everybody's house is. Will people take them if you advertise that they also play pretty music? Is it a problem if they play pretty music after my stunt with Universalis or will it be fine as long as the music library is of unrelated genres?"

connecticut_yankee

"It'd probably be safe enough.
Advertising that would mean more people take them, but nothing we can do will raise it to everybody. Should be more than enough that everyone knows someone with one, though, and then they can send pictures with their candidacy."

from_scratch

"I mean, to what extent do you want everyone to actually vote versus have the option to if they want? I don't think the United States has ever done compulsory voting."

connecticut_yankee

"Definitely the ability. It's why I'm more worried about illiterate voters than about barriers for candidates."

from_scratch

"I mean, if you going to wind up filtering out a subset of the population no matter how you try to get them to vote, 'unwilling to interact with a phone' seems like a reasonable enough ruling-out criterion to me, considering how much technology the place will be crawling with and how fast. What offices can people run for? What are their term lengths, are there term limits, can a single person hold multiple offices, how is the balance of powers handled, is there a constitution or are the elected representatives going to have to draw one up or do without? 'Democracy' is not a monolith."

connecticut_yankee

"I, ah, haven't decided how to arrange for a constitution. I can maximize my ability to improvise, though. If I announce that nobody can hold two offices and pretend it's obvious, then of course all the nobles will run for governorships of their current fiefdoms. Even if they all win, that leaves the Congress mostly in the hands of commoners who will be more than willing to adopt a decent modern constitution.
And probably nobody will call me on the fact that I don't actually have authority to say what offices there are."

from_scratch

"Well, if there's horrible amounts of infighting I can always descend again, halo and all, to clarify."

connecticut_yankee

"Unless something goes really horribly wrong, that sounds a bit like swatting a fly with a locomotive. There'll be opposition, but it should be possible to handle with ordinary political methods."

from_scratch

"Yes. But it's an option. I'm afraid I have no experience with politics to speak of. Hell is a comfortable anarchy and summoners never let me talk, so."

connecticut_yankee

"They don't let you talk? Is there a reason for that, or are they just trying to emphasize that they're in charge?"

from_scratch

"It's standard practice not to let demons, in particular, say anything but 'yes summoner' and 'no summoner', in response to summoner-proposed deals, lest demon-proposed deals involving charming features like summoner loss of soul be made to sound tempting. I cannot actually take human souls, it's just a rumor."

connecticut_yankee

"Neither can the sort of demon they're mistaking you for. This might be the first point where theology could actually help, except for the fact that they don't let you talk.

It's barbaric; it sounds like something nobles would do to serfs here."

from_scratch

"Taking summons is voluntary. I sign up for it every time I grab one. I could just stay in Hell, reading and flying around and making stuff. But yeah."

connecticut_yankee

"At least here, if summoning ever becomes common knowledge we could refrain from telling people silencing is possible. If it's not enough to just not use the word 'demon.'"

from_scratch

"Yeah, there's not really a good reason to include knowledge of how to gag a daeva."

connecticut_yankee

"Do daeva speak their summoner's dialect by default? If there's more than one mutually intelligible language available, I mean.
Because if we want to fix the ambiguity, we could easily make up English names for the types of daeva and and tell those to any new summoners. We could even put it in the dictionary. Whatever it takes to avoid having people introduce themselves as angels and demons."

from_scratch

"That's an interesting idea, actually, deliberate loanwords. The demons are still going to show up with the bat wings, of course, and the angels with the bird wings and the fairies with the bug wings - plus whatever else any of the above have decided to do to themselves for cosmetic fun and games. But yeah, I don't see any other reason that shouldn't work. 'Daeva' is a pretty neutral term and we can loanword in terms for the three species no problem."

connecticut_yankee

"As long as they hear 'are you an angel' as referring to the other kind so they know to say no. The wings will mean people stereotype anyway, but hopefully not as much as your world.
This probably isn't urgent, since for the near future anyone who learns about summoning should be carefully vetted first, but it's good to have a plan. Anything in particular you'd want to be called?"

from_scratch

"We could go with 'maker' and 'changer' and 'mover'. I mentioned a demonic word for demons earlier but the problem with that is the demonic languages have kind of loaded words for angels, some of them nearly as bad for fairies, and I'm actually not sure how much of that would come through in an engineered loanword setup."

connecticut_yankee

"Neutral words it is, then.
What do the types of daeva have against each other? Or is it just a case of disliking anything different?"

from_scratch

"Fairies get along fine with angels and demons both, it's just angels and - sorry, movers get along fine with makers and changers, but makers and changers as groups do not like one another. And everybody gets along fine with Limboites - maybe those should have a new name too."

connecticut_yankee

"We won't need to worry about religious confusion there; I haven't heard the word since arriving. Who are the Limboites, though? I don't think you've mentioned them."

from_scratch