Fwooosh! Ka-pow! WHOOOOM-OOOM-OOM-OM-OMM-MM-MMO-MMOO-MOOO-MOOOOHW! Big magic battle! Haven't had an action-battle set piece since the bounty hunters in London (I'm not counting the bombing). While I wasn't expecting it - after the portal tear reveal last week I would have been fine with an off-screen mop-up like with the dopur - it was fun. Also let you sneak in a bit more about how the magic system works. I assume the flare guys not only train for efficient transfer, but also STORAGE. Like they had to sit outside all day soaking up the sun to be ready for night. With Palinor magic lasting a while in Mid-Earth there are implications of...I'm not sure how to phrase it, but a few arcs ago I was speculating on magic batteries, so this is just another riff on that concept. Hope you liked my sound effects and that I correctly gave you the sense of the reversing explosion.
Letters aren't huge cheats. There are entire novels structured around letters and diary/journal entries (Bram Stoker's "Dracula" as one example, or, God help me, the majority of 400 pages of game narrative I wrote). Remember, when you're writing third person (even though you're using third person viewpoint, not omniscient) a letter is a chance to drop in a first person monolog. Lola's personality still shines through. I do love "P.S. I saw a magic battle." There you could have had Lola exposit more, but skipped redundancy with something like, "Clarke read the next three pages with a wry smile," but, nope. Just the one line. Heh. **Thought I'd get another line break. No dice. **Moving the SDC, eh? I'm sure there will be microphones AND cameras now... And a bunch of new faces, not all of whom will be trustworthy. Still think Walpole is on the up-and-up. **There's a throwaway line with wide ranging implications. Namely, "The Shawshank Redemption," having made it to Mid-Earth... Film reels or did VCRs/DVDs make it to Mid-Earth early? (For reference, first consumer VCRs launched in 1976 in Japan, 77 in the US, 78 in the UK.) If VCRs and/or the like made it to Mid-Earth then obviously other anachronistic tech would have as well. Here the Quantum Megaships may have made a few errors with what was historically available - understandable, since what's a decade or so from 500 years out, especially when sorting through the ridiculous amount of data accumulated during that time. Or, data were lost. Or, the Megaships don't care that much. With declarations of "No Slavery or No Trade" it's obvious the Megaships don't have a Star Trek "Prime Directive" of non-interference. **Which loops back to Shawshank... Chances are Mid-Earth had a Stephen King and Frank Darabont. Guess they'll just have to write other stories and make other movies, won't they? Hopefully the Megaships have some taste and sent over the original edits of the first "Star Wars" trilogy? Oh, who am I kidding, those were long gone and forgotten by the time the Megaships came to be. By the 22nd Century Disneymount (the merger of Disney, Paramount and Viacom in 2053) had remade the entire series, twice, and the first remake - largely considered the superior version, especially for the love triangle featuring Han Sheridan, Princess Leia Trinity and Chewspocka (no icky brother/sister stuff with Luke Starbuck in this version: but the second remake... Let's not talk about it.). Point being, lots of Timeline changes and you can only hint and imply in the space you have. I guess Elstree Studios is the hub of Mid-Earth film production.
The notion of a creator - say, Stephen King - existing in both universes, but being unable to create in Mid-Earth because the *alternate* version in Max-Earth has already done it centuries earlier is rather horrifying.
I'm not sure how common it would be by the time Mid-Earth hit the 1970s for there to be 'doppelgangers' in that way. A couple hundred years have passed, which would have generated enough divergence to result in difference human pairings, thus different children, and such fundamentally different life paths.
Very different to the early years when the portals first opened, and there was actually a whole form of tourism based around this. Max-Earth people travelling to Mid-Earth to meet their ancestors, Mid-Earth people using Max-Earth as a predictor of events (hence the USA doesn't exist, Napoleon was defeated differently etc).
Not only was a lot of that behaviour banned, as the timelines diverged it also became less practical. By the point of the main story, the three universes are less obviously 'versions' of each other, and exist as distinct realities.
(there was also a fear in the early days that Mid-Earth actually was Max-Earth's past. It wasn't confirmed at that point whether the triverse were three divergent universes, or some kind of time schism. As such, there was an early worry that actions taken on Mid-Earth could ripple out to the future of Max-Earth. Turned out that wasn't the case, but nobody knew. Would the assassination of the brains behind US independence cause the USA to vanish from Max-Earth history as well? Well, no, fortunately not!)
Other than a couple of exceptions, I have steered clear of overt magic pow-bam. I've always quite liked LotR's approach tot magic (use it sparingly) and even GoT's early books/episodes, when everyone's largely forgotten about being in a fantasy universe. In Triverse, there's some proper high fantasy stuff going on, but so far it's been largely out of sight. We've had glimpses of monsters and magic, mentions of crystal cities built on waterfalls, we've even met a couple of supposed actual gods, but it's all been at arm's reach.
Magic-science! I like!
Drawing power from the stars, interesting . I wonder how that affects the star? Do they use them up like batteries, basically? Hm.
These are good questions! :)
Also remember Kaenamor’s antics way back in the opening prologue.
Fwooosh! Ka-pow! WHOOOOM-OOOM-OOM-OM-OMM-MM-MMO-MMOO-MOOO-MOOOOHW! Big magic battle! Haven't had an action-battle set piece since the bounty hunters in London (I'm not counting the bombing). While I wasn't expecting it - after the portal tear reveal last week I would have been fine with an off-screen mop-up like with the dopur - it was fun. Also let you sneak in a bit more about how the magic system works. I assume the flare guys not only train for efficient transfer, but also STORAGE. Like they had to sit outside all day soaking up the sun to be ready for night. With Palinor magic lasting a while in Mid-Earth there are implications of...I'm not sure how to phrase it, but a few arcs ago I was speculating on magic batteries, so this is just another riff on that concept. Hope you liked my sound effects and that I correctly gave you the sense of the reversing explosion.
Letters aren't huge cheats. There are entire novels structured around letters and diary/journal entries (Bram Stoker's "Dracula" as one example, or, God help me, the majority of 400 pages of game narrative I wrote). Remember, when you're writing third person (even though you're using third person viewpoint, not omniscient) a letter is a chance to drop in a first person monolog. Lola's personality still shines through. I do love "P.S. I saw a magic battle." There you could have had Lola exposit more, but skipped redundancy with something like, "Clarke read the next three pages with a wry smile," but, nope. Just the one line. Heh. **Thought I'd get another line break. No dice. **Moving the SDC, eh? I'm sure there will be microphones AND cameras now... And a bunch of new faces, not all of whom will be trustworthy. Still think Walpole is on the up-and-up. **There's a throwaway line with wide ranging implications. Namely, "The Shawshank Redemption," having made it to Mid-Earth... Film reels or did VCRs/DVDs make it to Mid-Earth early? (For reference, first consumer VCRs launched in 1976 in Japan, 77 in the US, 78 in the UK.) If VCRs and/or the like made it to Mid-Earth then obviously other anachronistic tech would have as well. Here the Quantum Megaships may have made a few errors with what was historically available - understandable, since what's a decade or so from 500 years out, especially when sorting through the ridiculous amount of data accumulated during that time. Or, data were lost. Or, the Megaships don't care that much. With declarations of "No Slavery or No Trade" it's obvious the Megaships don't have a Star Trek "Prime Directive" of non-interference. **Which loops back to Shawshank... Chances are Mid-Earth had a Stephen King and Frank Darabont. Guess they'll just have to write other stories and make other movies, won't they? Hopefully the Megaships have some taste and sent over the original edits of the first "Star Wars" trilogy? Oh, who am I kidding, those were long gone and forgotten by the time the Megaships came to be. By the 22nd Century Disneymount (the merger of Disney, Paramount and Viacom in 2053) had remade the entire series, twice, and the first remake - largely considered the superior version, especially for the love triangle featuring Han Sheridan, Princess Leia Trinity and Chewspocka (no icky brother/sister stuff with Luke Starbuck in this version: but the second remake... Let's not talk about it.). Point being, lots of Timeline changes and you can only hint and imply in the space you have. I guess Elstree Studios is the hub of Mid-Earth film production.
The notion of a creator - say, Stephen King - existing in both universes, but being unable to create in Mid-Earth because the *alternate* version in Max-Earth has already done it centuries earlier is rather horrifying.
I'm not sure how common it would be by the time Mid-Earth hit the 1970s for there to be 'doppelgangers' in that way. A couple hundred years have passed, which would have generated enough divergence to result in difference human pairings, thus different children, and such fundamentally different life paths.
Very different to the early years when the portals first opened, and there was actually a whole form of tourism based around this. Max-Earth people travelling to Mid-Earth to meet their ancestors, Mid-Earth people using Max-Earth as a predictor of events (hence the USA doesn't exist, Napoleon was defeated differently etc).
Not only was a lot of that behaviour banned, as the timelines diverged it also became less practical. By the point of the main story, the three universes are less obviously 'versions' of each other, and exist as distinct realities.
(there was also a fear in the early days that Mid-Earth actually was Max-Earth's past. It wasn't confirmed at that point whether the triverse were three divergent universes, or some kind of time schism. As such, there was an early worry that actions taken on Mid-Earth could ripple out to the future of Max-Earth. Turned out that wasn't the case, but nobody knew. Would the assassination of the brains behind US independence cause the USA to vanish from Max-Earth history as well? Well, no, fortunately not!)
Other than a couple of exceptions, I have steered clear of overt magic pow-bam. I've always quite liked LotR's approach tot magic (use it sparingly) and even GoT's early books/episodes, when everyone's largely forgotten about being in a fantasy universe. In Triverse, there's some proper high fantasy stuff going on, but so far it's been largely out of sight. We've had glimpses of monsters and magic, mentions of crystal cities built on waterfalls, we've even met a couple of supposed actual gods, but it's all been at arm's reach.