delta v over delta t when there is no t

[ertia]

In a bar, there is a girl.

She looks like she has saved up all of her decadent and slothful impulses for a solid decade and is indulging them all at once. She is sprawled on a couch with a book she's only half-reading, and an ice cream sundae, and smiiiiiiling.

Comments

[first_and_final]

"Which things are different things, then?"

[ertia]

"The things you mentioned mostly are. Although turning visible again doesn't add anything - even maintaining invisibility pretty much doesn't except that you can't lose a power you are actively using by loss of generalist momentum, you'd just have specialist invisibility momentum left if you did that. But they aren't big enough. It's better than sleeping but it won't get you to sorcerer level - defined depending on locality as either flight or water breathing by generalist momentum alone. You need big stuff at sorcerer level - landscape-altering things at least every now and then."

[first_and_final]

"...I'm a little afraid that if I try any harder to figure this out I'm going to encourage some very bad mental habits in myself," he says. "But it's an interesting problem and I definitely think there's some kind of perspective issue at work here even if I can't quite tell what it is."

[ertia]

"Bad mental habits?"

[first_and_final]

"In my world - it sounds very much like yours doesn't have this problem, for which I congratulate you - hubris is a lethal character flaw, and I do mean that literally. I'm pretty sure that before I turn thirty I will have either died of it or ascended to the category of people whom everyone else has to worry about being hubristic near."

[ertia]

"Oh dear. Hubris is a necessary job skill for me. Doing magic requires an attitude of entitlement. Please do not swat people for being hubristic once you are big and scary."

[first_and_final]

"It would be a bad idea for me to start talking about the things I plan to do when I am big and scary, but swatting people for hubris definitely doesn't feature."

[ertia]

"That's reassuring."

[first_and_final]

"So in what way does doing magic require an attitude of entitlement...?"

[ertia]

"That's the procedure. Your momentum against whatever the world would be doing if you weren't there. It's actually sort of creepy when you're doing magic to people, but you have to get over it being creepy if you want to heal them or anything. Should I go into more detail or is this dangerous for you to hear?"

[first_and_final]

"...it's dangerous for me to hear but also undeniably tempting," he says.

[ertia]

"Well, let me know if you come to a decision on that, because for once in my life I do not have to be impatient. I'm Kithabel, what's your name?"

[first_and_final]

"Milan. Nice to meet you. Your world sounds terrifying but it's terrifying in a much more appealing way than mine."

[ertia]

"I think it's really nice in my world!" Kithabel protests.

[first_and_final]

"I'm sure," he says. "But much less nice for a manic-depressive with a lot of suppressed ambition and an ingrained flinch reaction to hubristic thoughts, you must admit."

[ertia]

"Well, you probably would have an awkward time being a sorcerer, that I admit, but you'd still benefit from there being lots of us around and we wouldn't smite you!"

[first_and_final]

"I refer you to the lot of suppressed ambition."

[ertia]

"So you'd probably try and not get much of anywhere, because it takes years to get much of anywhere and your depressive periods wouldn't mesh well, but still."

[first_and_final]

"...This conversation is so bad for my mental habits. I'm not totally sure I'm not fatally contaminated already."

[ertia]

"...Um, I'm sorry."

[first_and_final]

"It's not your fault, you didn't grow up in my world and you don't know me," he says. "But it's so very tempting to try to cross to your plane, let loose, and prove you wrong about what a bad sorcerer I'd be. Except that if I did that I could never go home again or I'd definitely die. Unless I got to epic scale first and your world's momentum translated unproblematically to mine, and I am not at all confident that it would, and there's no testing it except in the doing, which, again, runs a high risk of certain death."

[ertia]

"Well, you could see if a little momentum would stay with you if you went home with it. Although I'm not sure if I can hold the door for you without needing to be doing stuff myself."

[first_and_final]

"...That's... also the sort of thing that runs a moderate risk of death, especially considering what I'd be planning on using the knowledge for. My world does not take kindly to experimentation and it really doesn't take kindly to overreaching."

[ertia]

"Experimentation?"

[first_and_final]

"In my world, if you think you have figured out a clever trick by which you can get ahead of everyone else, you're almost certainly wrong and depending on what you're meddling with it may literally explode in your face," he says. "Trying to figure out how the world works, in a new area or at a significantly increased level of detail relative to what's already common knowledge, is the sort of thing best done very humbly and cautiously and keeping in mind that the world might at any moment, usually the most inconvenient one possible, abruptly decide to start working in a slightly but crucially different way."