chalk

[alicornucopia]

In Paraasilan, Esmaar, a pair of roommates are about to break a rule that, compared to the one about running in the corridors or even the one about unlicensed teleportation, is there for a good reason.

In unison, they complete their shared spell.

~~~

with Adarin (Aestrix)

with Ekador (kappa)

with Brilliance (kappa)

with the admin (kappa)

with Teah (kappa)

with Katran (lambda)

with Hall (kappa)

with Joy (kappa)

with Kalinda (Christy Hotwater)

Comments

[aeskhyne]

"Any bright ideas about how to figure out what is safe to try?"

[alicornucopia]

"...I usually avoid them like the plague because they're buggy, but there exist spells to tell the future, and this is actually the kind of thing that they're good at, specific planned action that might do one of two broad classes of things probably based on stable factors as opposed to small perturbations."

[aeskhyne]

"Spells to tell the future, huh? How's that work? What kind of buggy are they?"

[alicornucopia]

"They're kind of terrible in practice most of the time. The ones that work by anything other than random chance are extrapolatory, not prognosticatory. They don't look at the future, they look at - moving parts in the present. Basically what I'd do would be I'd look up one of these spells, and then tell somebody who'd do it on my say-so to go give you a potion at a certain time, and then cast the spell to see what happens at that time, and then if I got a clean result it'd tell me whether to stop them or not. It'd work best if you agreed in advance to do something specific and informative in response to whatever happened. I could give the person with the potion a list of questions to ask your body-self in case he still doesn't remember being you on waking, if that's how it shakes out."

[aeskhyne]

Half a tick - the list updates yet again -

"Explain that more?" he says. (In the barely-perceptible pause between sentences, Kaylo is offered a choice-wrapped-in-truth: whether or not to have the reservoir's attention drawn to him to cause his CC to increase slowly over time.) "What's the point of the list of questions? What kind of 'specific and informative' are you looking for?"

[alicornucopia]

"Like if we agree in advance that unwhat the hell?"

[aeskhyne]

"Huh?"

[alicornucopia]

"You did a thing. I wasn't praying for it, where did the thing come from? ...Also how long does it sit here if I don't juke one way or the other?"

[aeskhyne]

"Sits there as long as you haven't picked something. I'm talking to you, I told you about choices in the list but I didn't go into detail and I figured you might want to know what they're like and that might be something you'd want, so it came under 'talking to you'."

[alicornucopia]

"If I pick 'no' can you re-try or does it stop being relevant then or what? I do not plan to pick no, I'm just - examining it while it's still here."

[aeskhyne]

"Now that we're talking about it I bet I could keep offering it to you all day if for some reason you felt like doing that. Might be a little less relevant to spring it on you out of nowhere again."

[alicornucopia]

"There's degrees of relevance? How does that factor in?"

[aeskhyne]

"There's degrees of relevance, and things are either relevant enough or they aren't, but if they're on the edge sometimes that goes back and forth a little."

[alicornucopia]

"Say more about the going back and forth?"

[aeskhyne]

"Like, if something's really on the edge like that then whether or not I can do it can change from moment to moment, depending on how I'm thinking about it at the time. It usually settles out pretty fast one way or another, but it happens. Mostly when I'm in the middle of doing something and it reminds me of something else through a weird tenuous chain of associations."

[alicornucopia]

"Can I get an example of a tenuous chain of associations?"

[aeskhyne]

"Like - hypothetical example: somebody wants their headache fixed, they're wearing a blue shirt, that reminds me of water, reminds me of the beach, reminds me of that girl who wanted a pretty shell, I go look her up and she needs something but isn't praying for it - I might be able to help her still holding onto the headache prayer, but I probably wouldn't, because it's just too far gone. And I bet it'd flicker like that."

[alicornucopia]

"Can you tell where in a chain like that is the weak link that's making it unstable or untenable?"

[aeskhyne]

"Sort of not exactly. Because what matters is if I think it's relevant or not, and that changes depending how I'm thinking about it - if I look at it and think 'nah, too far', I'm probably not basing that on any one specific connection so much as just a feeling about the whole thing, and if I stop and try to work it out more specifically then how I'm thinking about it changes and whatever weak link I find only counts for the new thinking."

[alicornucopia]

"Hm, inconvenient. What would happen if somebody prayed to be a whatever-you-are?"

[aeskhyne]

"I wouldn't know how to give it to 'em. And I'm not sure I'd want to, depending who it was. They'd better be at minimum as nice as me, for sure."

[alicornucopia]

"I'm making no statements about whether the things I'm asking about are in general wise or not, I'm talking theory," Kaylo says. "Back to the future-telling spell - there are all kinds of probably superstitious ways to go about it to make the results come in clean, but what we'd want to do would basically be everybody involved making up their minds to follow through with the waking potion test, and you in particular making up your mind to react specific ways if you can. Then, if the spell works like it's supposed to instead of falling apart like a badly engineered house of cards, I will see what would happen if you got the potion - specifically I'd see you reacting in some predetermined way, with magic or by talking to my accomplice or whatever - and then we wouldn't have to complete the experiment to know how it'd go. If the results came back clean, which they might not, because these spells are idiotic."

[aeskhyne]

"Define 'idiotic', I'm having trouble finding an example in history. People don't seem to cast them that often."

[alicornucopia]

"That is because they're idiotic," says Kaylo. "It extrapolates the future. The problem is, what I'm likely to do feeds into the future. So if I'm in the wrong frame of mind - it's not even an intentional component like normal spells - when I cast it, then my decisions if I get whatever result will feed into it and I get noise. For the spell to be useful I have to sit on the sidelines enough for it to get a result that doesn't factor me in, but not so far that I can't interrupt if it turns out giving you a potion will be a disaster. And you will too, since I guess you'll be able to both see what results I get and affect the processes that would lead to them."

[aeskhyne]

"Okay. So I have to be - really predictable," he says. "And we have to figure out how to get mortal me to be really predictable even if he doesn't remember who I am? That sounds hard."