Wow, the part about Paf not sensing a mind really stood out. It's fascinating how you explore AI consciousness, or lack there of. Makes you wonder if true sentience is even detectable by our defintions.
Paf: (almost gets disintegrated) Do not underestimate the thing as powerful as I am.
Rest of Gods: (immediately underestimate the thing as powerful as Paf)
Probably Better: (NUKE!)
Unihex: (about to learn if they can survive vacuum and/or re-entry)
I mean, I've been waiting for the Gods to learn much to their disadvantage, but I certainly wasn't expecting PB to immediately almost disassemble a God at the molecular level. Not certain if PBs interceptors were robot bodies of if they still have ordinance left over from earlier battles.
On the other hand, the Gods do have PB rattled. Even for a megaship a nuclear explosion is damaging -- so using one at point blank range is a desperation tactic.
This should buy Lola and Yana time...
...unless they are clinging to a rock a few hundred feet down.
The opening paragraphs beautifully set up the divine perspective.
Hubris and arrogance are core to many of the more problematic characters in Triverse - including the gods! And there's something quite satisfying about Palinor's gods facing off against Max-Earth's gods. Metaphors ftw
The escalation in the story at this point is fairly off-the-charts, especially if you think back to the procedural cop stuff in season 1. It's quite fun to think about how far we've come from there to here - that said, I'm looking forward to scoping back down to the human level soon.
Thing about "escalation" is, again, it's been built-in since the very beginning. We open with Kaenamor ripping holes between multiple universes and eating an entire star to do so. This is a ridiculous power level to establish in Chapter 1.
We'd seen Gods before, so their literal presence was established. We're just now seeing them unleashed.
The capabilities of the AI motherships had been slowly built up.
Magic has been floating around the entire time, we're just seeing the same techniques applied at a greater level. For a bad metaphor we'll say we've had a bunch of music playing on a Bluetooth speaker, but now we're blasting through an arena concert rig. It's still just a sound system.
It's not like the events of "Gods and Robots" suddenly came from nowhere -- it's all been established in the background. Now it's foreground.
One could plot the foreground prevalence of insane power over the entire saga as a graph. You've got a huge spike at the beginning which tailed off quickly during the 1972 arcs. There have been spikes here and there with a trend line slowly moving upwards. Once PB destroyed New Rhodes the graph started rapidly climbing, with another huge spike here (to echo the spike in the beginning and balance out the tale). Because this is a climax it's going to basically plateau here for a few chapters with a few more spikes. Then you'll drop it down again in the epilog as you do final character wrap ups.
In short, pretty much perfect textbook structure.
Also textbook "Chekov's Gun." The story began with multiverse-rending power. We'd have to see that again, unless you were pulling a Larry Niven* and a key part of the story was the decline of magic in toto.
*Niven has a series of tales about "The Warlock" around the Fall of Atlantis. In these stories magic is a finite resource which has almost been exhausted. Welders literally cannot do things they did a century ago because the power just doest exist. To spoil one short story, The Warlock defeats a demon with a "Warlock's Wheel." It's a simple spell -- a suspended wheel is strengthened with magic and set to spin faster and faster and faster. This basically consumes the local magic field until the level of the ambient magic drops to where the spell can no longer maintain itself. This causes the wheel to detonate with all the kinetic energy it's accumulated. The demon wasn't able to maintain its form in a no-magic zone and was dispelled... But the spell keeping the Warlock young also failed, almost killing him from old age.
It's the type of "logical approach" to magic I think would appeal to you.
Magic as finite, near expended resource is also key to my own Pangaea setting. When the Gods were driven from Mount Olympia they took the mountain (and surrounding Atlantis) with them and formed the moon as their new home (also opening the hole to the Hollow Earth at the North Pole, which had been near the equator). This also spun the entire world (and kickstarted continental drift), but ALSO took up so much power, and damaged Earth so that magic is bleeding out through the rupture. Within a few centuries/millenia (I keep going back and forth on time scales) of the primary game setting magic levels will drop enough that the Gods will die.
If we envision magic as being an exponential or logarithmic or geometrical expanding scale with 10 being the top end, magic dropped to a 9.
In game terms the Gods rolled "Mixed Success" on that spell.
It also sets up resource depletion as a game theme.
Wow, the part about Paf not sensing a mind really stood out. It's fascinating how you explore AI consciousness, or lack there of. Makes you wonder if true sentience is even detectable by our defintions.
It's a fun thing to explore, and is an unanswered question in the story. As you say, it depends a lot on definitions.
Paf: (almost gets disintegrated) Do not underestimate the thing as powerful as I am.
Rest of Gods: (immediately underestimate the thing as powerful as Paf)
Probably Better: (NUKE!)
Unihex: (about to learn if they can survive vacuum and/or re-entry)
I mean, I've been waiting for the Gods to learn much to their disadvantage, but I certainly wasn't expecting PB to immediately almost disassemble a God at the molecular level. Not certain if PBs interceptors were robot bodies of if they still have ordinance left over from earlier battles.
On the other hand, the Gods do have PB rattled. Even for a megaship a nuclear explosion is damaging -- so using one at point blank range is a desperation tactic.
This should buy Lola and Yana time...
...unless they are clinging to a rock a few hundred feet down.
The opening paragraphs beautifully set up the divine perspective.
Hubris and arrogance are core to many of the more problematic characters in Triverse - including the gods! And there's something quite satisfying about Palinor's gods facing off against Max-Earth's gods. Metaphors ftw
The escalation in the story at this point is fairly off-the-charts, especially if you think back to the procedural cop stuff in season 1. It's quite fun to think about how far we've come from there to here - that said, I'm looking forward to scoping back down to the human level soon.
Thing about "escalation" is, again, it's been built-in since the very beginning. We open with Kaenamor ripping holes between multiple universes and eating an entire star to do so. This is a ridiculous power level to establish in Chapter 1.
We'd seen Gods before, so their literal presence was established. We're just now seeing them unleashed.
The capabilities of the AI motherships had been slowly built up.
Magic has been floating around the entire time, we're just seeing the same techniques applied at a greater level. For a bad metaphor we'll say we've had a bunch of music playing on a Bluetooth speaker, but now we're blasting through an arena concert rig. It's still just a sound system.
It's not like the events of "Gods and Robots" suddenly came from nowhere -- it's all been established in the background. Now it's foreground.
One could plot the foreground prevalence of insane power over the entire saga as a graph. You've got a huge spike at the beginning which tailed off quickly during the 1972 arcs. There have been spikes here and there with a trend line slowly moving upwards. Once PB destroyed New Rhodes the graph started rapidly climbing, with another huge spike here (to echo the spike in the beginning and balance out the tale). Because this is a climax it's going to basically plateau here for a few chapters with a few more spikes. Then you'll drop it down again in the epilog as you do final character wrap ups.
In short, pretty much perfect textbook structure.
Also textbook "Chekov's Gun." The story began with multiverse-rending power. We'd have to see that again, unless you were pulling a Larry Niven* and a key part of the story was the decline of magic in toto.
*Niven has a series of tales about "The Warlock" around the Fall of Atlantis. In these stories magic is a finite resource which has almost been exhausted. Welders literally cannot do things they did a century ago because the power just doest exist. To spoil one short story, The Warlock defeats a demon with a "Warlock's Wheel." It's a simple spell -- a suspended wheel is strengthened with magic and set to spin faster and faster and faster. This basically consumes the local magic field until the level of the ambient magic drops to where the spell can no longer maintain itself. This causes the wheel to detonate with all the kinetic energy it's accumulated. The demon wasn't able to maintain its form in a no-magic zone and was dispelled... But the spell keeping the Warlock young also failed, almost killing him from old age.
It's the type of "logical approach" to magic I think would appeal to you.
Magic as finite, near expended resource is also key to my own Pangaea setting. When the Gods were driven from Mount Olympia they took the mountain (and surrounding Atlantis) with them and formed the moon as their new home (also opening the hole to the Hollow Earth at the North Pole, which had been near the equator). This also spun the entire world (and kickstarted continental drift), but ALSO took up so much power, and damaged Earth so that magic is bleeding out through the rupture. Within a few centuries/millenia (I keep going back and forth on time scales) of the primary game setting magic levels will drop enough that the Gods will die.
If we envision magic as being an exponential or logarithmic or geometrical expanding scale with 10 being the top end, magic dropped to a 9.
In game terms the Gods rolled "Mixed Success" on that spell.
It also sets up resource depletion as a game theme.
But I digress. As I do.
All the nice boys say that... !!