exploratory kidnapping

[alicornucopia]

In this room are two women, one gray and sixty years old, one just thirty and red-haired, both wearing elaborate outfits. The younger casts a spell.

In this room is now also a third person. (On whom the elder woman promptly also casts a spell, which she had at the ready.)

Comments

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo gets something else to read in the meantime.

Lie Detection: Parameters and Practice has many kinds of lie detection that are more or less strict about what counts as a "lie" and have different ways of displaying their results which may be more or less finely-grained and more or less informative about what part of an utterance is false.

[missnicegirl]

She isn't quite satisfied with any of the particular kinds, but she gets a very clear idea of the kind of more generalized and flexible lie detection she might want to be able to do with ialdae.

Maybe she can just... make one.

She thinks over her design, and tells it to exist, and it does.

"I think it's getting easier to teach ialdae new things," she announces. "And I have my lie detection and I want to test it."

[alicornucopia]

"I am a cabbage," obliges Kaylo, turning a page.

[missnicegirl]

Matilda giggles. "It works!"

[alicornucopia]

"Where'd you fall on middling things? My name is Kalobes Ansal. Lialen is the true theory of conjured matter. Destandaar Palan is the right appointee for the empty Parliament slot. There are like a dozen people in my geography seminar."

[missnicegirl]

"Arguable but false, tentative, true, vague but true," she summarizes.

[alicornucopia]

"Nice, although you could get tripped up if you're going to have matters of political opinion turn up as just plain true."

[missnicegirl]

"It wasn't quite the same, but I don't have an exact technical vocabulary for the complicated lie detection I invented five ticks ago."

[alicornucopia]

"Fair. Hmm - Because shoes are usually manufactured in sizes too narrow for my feet, I order mine custom."

[missnicegirl]

"Why do you order custom shoes?"

[alicornucopia]

"Very nice. 'Cause I like a kind that nobody mass-produces as of like fifty years ago and shoes count as a necessity so my aunt has to pay for 'em."

[missnicegirl]

Matilda giggles.

[alicornucopia]

"Aaand - hmm - ever since I started school I have liked olives."

[missnicegirl]

"True without causal implication. I like my lie detection."

[alicornucopia]

"It sounds more helpful than wizard ones! How do I steal it?"

[missnicegirl]

"I'm not completely sure. It seems to be harder for people who aren't me to get ialdae to do things."

[alicornucopia]

"Why?"

[missnicegirl]

"It's probably related to the fact that as far as I know I'm the first person who ever got ialdae to do things. Maybe it's very hard for most people and I'm just especially good at it. You could try studying my lie detection and then seeing if you can copy it - you can see it, right?"

The fact that it's on Matilda makes it a little hard to pick out against the glare, but it's perfectly legible once identified. It's a very tidy little thing, surprisingly elegant for the complexity of its results; rather than having a rigidly defined structure for sorting statements by truth value, it rides on a fuzzy conceptual understanding of what truth means and evaluates statements from both the speaker's and listener's perspective to identify mismatches. The display method is similar to ialdic magic-seeing, but applied to an imaginary written version of spoken statements, never directly interfacing with one's visual field.

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo peers at it. "Sort of hard to see versus the backdrop of Look At All This Ialdae - say, how is this going to react if someone speaks unclearly and you can't quite hear what they said?"

[missnicegirl]

"It doesn't give me information about things I can't hear... but for things I only sort of hear, I think it would probably tell me I didn't hear it right," she muses.

[alicornucopia]

"Oh, nice, I don't think there's a wizarding lie detection invented that'll handle that by itself. Hmmm -" Kaylo attempts to copy the spell. "What I'm wondering is what traits being good at ialdae correlates with. Being a good wizard is about - up to a point, anyway - good fine motor control and diction, and then memory, especially working memory, and at the upper levels conceptual intelligence."

[missnicegirl]

"Well, I am very smart. But I don't know if that's why I'm so good at ialdae or if it's just a coincidence."

[alicornucopia]

Kaylo blinks at the statement as it appears under his copied lie detection. "You know, this could be adapted to convey a lot of extra nuance, sort of like wolfrider backchannel but on top of a functional verbal vocabulary and grammar - off topic - anyway - okay, I am also very smart, do I seem or look better at it than less smart people who've also caught the stuff?"

[missnicegirl]

"Well, you're not as far out of range for dragons as I am for humans, when it comes to how fast you generate ialdae and how much you carry around. I'm out of range for any species on those. I can't directly see a parameter for how good you are at teaching it things... but that doesn't mean there isn't one, it just means ialdae hasn't learned how to see it yet, probably because it isn't as obvious. And I don't think I've seen you do enough ialdae to know how good you are at it without just magically seeing the answer. You did copy my lie detection really fast..."

[alicornucopia]

"All right, so I should invent something. How about a ward? Heck, if I can do one that will keep out ialdic teleporters it might be worth deanonymizing to collect a trillion aaberik for re-warding the entire nation of Esmaar."