= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) discussion thread
In the vein of the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion threads this is the place to discuss anything relating to Alicorn's Twilight fanfic Luminosity. The fanfic is also archived on Alicorn's own website <strike>(warning: white text on black background)</strike>.
Previous discussion is hidden so deeply within the first Methods of Rationality thread that it's difficult to find even if you already know it exists.
Similar to how Eliezer's fanfic popularizes material from his sequences Alicorn is using the insights from her Luminosity sequence.
Spoilers for the fanfic itself as well as the original novels need and should not be hidden, but spoiler protection still applies for any other works of fiction, except for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality chapters more than a week old so we can freely discuss similarities and differences.
EDIT: Post-ginormous-spoiler discussion should go to the second thread. (If you have any doubt on whether you have reached the spoiler in question you have not.)
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (435)
My biggest issue with the fic so far is that the bizzare way Alice's precognition interacts with peoples decisions (I have no idea whether it works like that in the original novels since I haven't read a word from them) doesn't seem to puzzle Bella at all.
If people are just a physical system like any other Alice's powers should be able to predict them just like any other physical system. Since they are strangely unpredictable for her exploring what other physical systems are similarly unpredictable should provide information on how people work. For instance if Alice can't predict anything influenced by quantum events that would be a big clue that quantum events are involved in cognition. if she can't predict anything sufficiently chaotic (in the chaos theory sense) that would give away how chaotic people's decision making is.
If nothing inanimate poses similar difficulties that points towards either a psychological limitation she might be able to break out of, or the existence of some sort of magical free will in that universe. Do any animals have it? In addition to humans vampires obviously also do. And pointing this out to Edward (who apparently believes in the existence of souls, but also that he doesn't have one) might be useful.
If you imagine that the future is modeled by differential equations, and that Alice can discern the coefficients for these equations to within a certain value, there will be certain equations which are obviously determined (f~=f' and others which aren't (f~=.0001*f')
In the same way that people feel that tables are solid, because the reaction to their hand is fairly determined, and pillows are soft, because the reaction depends on how you're moving your hand, it makes sense (to me) that predicting the future could easily have fuzzy areas.
If this isn't how it works, then Alice should be able to do NP-complete problems in polynomial time, as in rationalist!Harry's experience with the time turner. Perhaps this will be explored?
Wow, that sounds like including it might involve math. Sorry.
Kind of... but mostly I just mean if you have a problem that is easy to check if you have the answer but hard to find the answer in the first place (this is what NP-complete means) then Alice can look at the future when you found the answer and told her what it is, then tell you the answer now and you only have to check it. (locating the answer is what would make NP = P, iirc. There's currently a proof that this is impossible in peer review.)
If there is some kind of fuzziness like I described then she might just see a piece of paper with an equation or something. If she can read text then this is a serious problem for luminosity!theoretical compute science.
It would take almost as long to check things like this with Alice as it would to manually check things alone. You'd have to make up your mind to check each possible answer individually, and then Alice could see what would happen if you went on to actually check it. It might save a little time relative to actually going through elaborate checking rigmarole, although adding a second person to the task would make it more person-hours on net.
But you can't just make up your mind to check every possible answer, without picking out a specific one and going, "I'm planning to check this one and then stop". That isn't a plausible thing for you to decide to do if you actually know how hard it's supposed to be, because there's no way you'll actually do it. So Alice can't see you finding the answer.
So it's mostly useful for problems of moderate solvability, that you could solve without the power, given a considerable effort (but not more effort than you would be willing to actually put forth).
For example, you could set Hashcash to mint some expensive stamp, and firmly decide to check its output in three days.
(For those who don't want to take the time to read the link, Hashcash is a proof-of-work system based on brute-force partial preimage attacks against hash (one-way) algorithms.)
Exploiting causal loops to solve NP problems does not involve checking all candidates in sequence and then transporting the answer back. Rather, it involves checking only one candidate, but deciding which candidate to check in such a way that the situation is self-consistent if and only if that one candidate is the correct answer. In context, this depends on being able to foresee the outcome of a simple firmly decided conditional strategy, where the events you plan to condition on are the contents of the vision itself.
So if the visions are generated by a computationally unbounded process that extrapolates from inexact snapshots of the present (which include plans and dispositions but not some of the other contents of minds), then the NP trick could work: The dependency of the future on Alice's reaction to the vision is well-defined and available to the extrapolation process. Or it could just give her a headache; that's self-consistent too.
If the vision generator refuses to hypothesize any visions within the extrapolation process, or if it doesn't care whether extrapolated-Alice gets false visions, or if it's computationally bounded and only iterates towards a fixed point at a limited rate, then the trick would fail.
And if it's not extrapolation-based, then I dunno, but I can't think of any interpretations that would be incompatible with a headache.
But Alice's power doesn't work like that. It predicts the future conditional on Alice not having seen the prediction.
But the point is that you can solve these problems, just that it takes significantly longer to solve them than it does to check the answer once you have it.
So you decide to do a brute force calculation on a computer for three days, write down the answer and tell her (a la kavitra's comment) then she sees the answer on the paper in the future and you change your mind and just check the answer.
Because Alice sees without the prediction, there's no need to have a stable causal loop like pengvado discusses.
I'm trying to be canon-compliant in terms of worldbuilding and all characters except Bella. So, yeah, Alice's power works pretty much the same way in the originals, although I've found excuses to bring it up more frequently.
My (largely surface level, not physics-inspired) explanation for her limitations is that people's decisions are the only things liable to be affected by her advance knowledge. The weather doesn't change based on what she or anyone else does, and so she is a perfectly reliable meteorologist except at time scales so far in advance that butterfly effect type stuff starts adding up. However, when she sees things, even if she tells no one, her own decisions change, and so does what Edward can see in her head, etc.
Alice's visions are: a) purely visual, b) do not tend to have vantage points from inside of objects, c) are only mostly under her control, and d) can be changed even after she's become very confident in them. She cannot see inside people's future minds. She can't perfectly decide what to see. The sorts of things that upset her visions after she's had them are reactions to that vision itself in her or others (like when she sees Bella telling her something that there is subsequently no reason for Bella to share), decisions that haven't been made yet being prompted by other factors (like when James's coven heard the baseball game), and people deliberately exploiting the nature of her visions (the way James did).
In canon, it turns out that she can't see Quileute wolves or half-vampires, nor things they affect, at all - the initial supposition is that Quileutes are just too unpredictable because of how their shapeshifting is unexpected, but that's patently ridiculous. They often do predictable things and many have good control over their "phasing". In the last book she blames the gap on "half breeds" in general and says she can see humans because she was one and vampires because she is one. In neither case does canon indicate that she actually knows what's going on instead of just guessing, so I'm going to freely invent here.
As a character, Bella cares somewhat more about what it is that various powers can accomplish than the mechanism that makes them work. It is obvious to her from the moment she learns about Alice's abilities that Alice has the ability to save her from various miserable fates like getting hit by a car. (In canon, Edward had to risk exposure to knock her out of the way, because he'd kept telling Alice to stay out of the situation and she was getting only involuntary Bella-visions, not paying attention to her deliberately for informational purposes.) Bella is unlikely to devote considerable time to devising Alicey experiments until the very serious gaps in precog as used with wolves and half-vamps come up. At that time, learning how the power works can confer a significant practical improvement if there's a way to work around it. Before, Alice is unlikely to become significantly more valuable via information about the nuts and bolts of her visions.
Well, obviously her visions only show her the future as it would have been, had she not received that vision, or something like that. But since she can see counter-factual futures the fact that her reaction would undo a particular future can't explain why she doesn't see that future in the first place.
You could further stipulate that she can only see futures that are indiscriminate to the way her visions counter-factually ended up not to containing them , i. e. that turn out the same whether she counter-factually changed her mind on trying to see that future or counter-factually tried but failed, or something similar (e. g. that she counter-factually received some other vision, counter-factually based on yet another, but only when the visions cycle between a limited number of possibilities, which leads to similar results with somewhat different details).
This would not explain why her visions fail even if the undecided subject is sufficiently far away not to be influenced by nuances of her counter-factual reactions, i. e. when trying to see what someone is doing between now and time X when X is the earliest possible point when she could affect anything. Maybe she can't see anything she couldn't possibly see with her own eyes no matter what she does, so she can't receive those sorts of visions in the first place. But finding out would still be useful (e. g. so she could arrange for really fast transportation on hand to increase her vision range). And if what's blocking her visions vs. "undecided" things is of the sort speculated about above she could circumvent it with suitable precommitments and staying outside the subjects actual sensory range (while the subject is still within her potential sensory range).
As for your explanations why your Bella does not care to find out, it's your character, but it does seem somewhat at odds with the stated irresistibility of mysteries for her, or the way she insists on testing the various vampire abilities. Also finding out might have allowed for a more convenient way to block her from reading her notebook entries, and possibly allowed her to find James.
You know, I'd never thought I'd stay up late (2AM!) reading Twilight fanfiction. I've done it for Harry Potter, but Twilight?
In any case, possible manipulation of Alice's precognition makes me think of Kavka's toxin puzzle
In particular, if Bella intends to do something knowing it will trigger Alice to see it in the future, but then the payoff comes through via Alice seeing it... it's not quite the same setup.
I don't think this actually occurs in the story up to where I'm currently at (I recall a scene where Bella mentions she'll do something/say something to Alice, Alice sees it in the future and explains it, Bella questions it, and Alice says that what she saw was what would have happened if she hadn't seen the vision), but I do wonder if this could apply some limitations in some form - 'I intend to do X that I really really don't want to do, but will do it because it will trigger Alice's vision which will then make it so that I don't have to do it'.
This class of problems has a general solution: the Readability Bookmarklet. It adjusts the colors, font size, margins, and so on, with the press of a button. It's useful all over the place.
Hey, I hadn't even thought of making a bookmarklet for general readability. Off to code my own - maybe I can even make this website look halfway decent.
On vanilla Firefox you can just go to the View Menu, select Page Style, and choose the "No Style" option.
Well "No Style" doesn't work well on Less Wrong since the site is built badly, and anyway I use Google Chrome which sadly doesn't have that functionality yet.
Good internal conflict between her wanting to die during the change in 27, and not wanting to be dead afterward. Reminds me of some interesting ethical questions about assisted suicide and cryonics... Just because someone in pain is asking to die, does that really mean they want to be dead? Should we respect their wishes?
I want to write a fanfic about paperclips.
Maybe I could also use it to teach correct reasoning.
A fanfic based on what? Which books do you like?
Books on metallurgy, automation, programming ... stuff like that.
Go ahead! I'd like to read some clipper fic.
Those don't tend to be fiction, do they?
Why does it matter? Can't I just say something like, "This example doesn't correspond to any actual paperclip that's been made"?
fanfic is based on existing works of fiction.
Merely a definitional issue. If you'd like to write original fiction about paperclips, that's cool too.
So people somehow like it more when it's fake? Don't you have that reversed?
I don't think people like fanfic more than fiction in general. Of course if there's fiction they like then they enjoy getting more of it, even if not from the same author.
Oh, I found something! I could write a fanfic about this! It would be a great platform to show effective, human-relevant uses of paperclips.
Maybe I could write a fanfic where MacGyver must prevent a group of racists from destroying paperclips.
Is fanfic about this character popular?
Apparantly
I do not believe I have the words to describe how awesome that would be.
Very.
What if the human-relevant use requires bending a paperclip in such a way that it can no longer be used to hold sheets of paper together? For example, using a paperclip to pick a lock. Would you support such a use of paperclips?
Paperclips aren't usually sold one at a time. If you habitually keep paperclips around, even with the intention of unbending them as you need them, then you will increase net expected demand for intact paperclips.
Also an unbent paperclip can be easily rebent to paperclip-ness. So it hasn't undergone information theoretic destruction.
But it nevertheless is a non-paperclip, even if only temporarily. It's no different from a bit of newly-manufactured wire that could be bent into a paperclip but hasn't been yet, or a bit of liquid metal ready to be loaded into a paperclip-shaped mold.
We don't have a fully-specified printout of Clippy's utility function. It could be that unbent paperclips are just a little annoying, or that extruded unbent wire is much better than kittens.
It's okay to do that to prevent other paperclips from becoming unbent, or if you can rebend it afterward. But obviously, don't keep bending and unbending a paperclip, or it will break!
If the paperclip can't be restored to its paperclippy state, be sure to recycle the scrap metal so that new ones can be formed.
Clippy. I will read a twilight fanfic! Not because i enjoy the series so much that i want more, but because that is where Alicorn is providing some interesting stuff in! Choose the format you like and there will be people reading it!
What did you think about my article about signaling and unstoppable punishment?
Its surely not fiction. I would not want you to enforce human decisions. Especially with all the problems that human wishes already have, and also the problem of entrusting you with too much power, while your goals are so non human.
Would you go for virtual paperclips? They can be way more of those than the real matter ones. Wow could implement paperclips as items, and store your amount in a special floating point number, that could increase for the whole time of the universe.
If you do not have any real world application for them, going virtual might make your goals way more reachable.
The problem with vampires drinking human blood isn't the "drinking human blood" part, it's the "killing people to get the blood" part. The obvious solution seems to be to drink donated blood from blood banks and such. Are there any reasons why this wouldn't work? Is preserved blood no longer edible? Would it drain the local blood bank faster than people normally donate? Is the scent of humans still tempting even after consuming a large amount of blood?
I can't find the reference at the moment, but I think they said that drinking human blood impairs the mind somehow, increasing the desire to feed on humans and making the vampire more animalistic.
Donated blood is edible, and even at room temperature and full of whatever it is the Red Cross puts in it, it's tastier to vampires than animal blood. Doctors, such as Carlisle, are legally able to purchase blood, and in fact he is shown to do so in canon; no concern about depleting the blood supply is mentioned, although it would be surprising if there were none.
However, consuming human blood instead of animal blood makes vampires less able to resist the impulse to eat live humans, who are yet still more appealing than donated blood, even when the vampire attempting to resist is not particularly thirsty. The thirst is constant, and while it is reduced in force and intrusiveness by having recently eaten, the factor preventing the Cullens from slaughtering everyone in town is willpower, not disinterest. Edward is shown in "Midnight Sun" to be able to eat half a herd of elk and come to school the next day and find that Bella's scent is "like a wrecking ball", no less demanding than it was the first time.
As a much more minor side point, drinking human blood makes vampire eyes red, which would be more conspicuous than gold, black, or any of the range of colors in between. Contact lenses are possible, but are dissolved over the course of a few hours by the venom in their eyes.
Twilight vampires have eye venom? In case werewolves try to eat their eyes out of their sockets?
Yes. Yes they do. They have venom in the place of just about every plausible fluid.
A whole new meaning for "use protection" it would seem.
This must be because they're related to toads.
Immortal toads. (From, unfortunately, one of the most blatantly deathist works ever written.)
Why don't the Cullens keep a stockpile of stored blood (human or animal) on hand to use in crisis situations? If they had, then Edward would not have had to leave Bella alone to go hunt in chapter 23.
They don't keep human blood on hand for the aforementioned reasons: if they ever drank it they'd be at greater risk of killing someone. Since it obviously makes immense amounts of sense to store animal blood and they never do it in canon, I'm explaining this by saying that preserved animal blood would be so unpalatable that they couldn't possibly choke it down.
So, assuming that I found Twilight movie moderately lame and haven't read the novels, would you recommend I take a look at this fanfic?
It occurs to me that this fanfic would make the worst feature of Twilight bearable. Vampires that glitter and sparkle in the light at least do justice to the title "Luminosity" even if they are a disgrace to the vampire myth.
Sparkly vampires are not the worst feature of Twilight.
Anyway, no affection for or knowledge of Twilight is required to enjoy Luminosity. Although if sparkly vampires really piss you off, then perhaps you won't like it; I'm canon-compliant in the worldbuilding department up to and including sparkles.
Out of curiosity... what is? I personally found canon!Edward just incredibly boring given that I am used to Spike and Wolverine (the latter being closer to a conventional vampire than Edward is). But I don't recall much else and there wasn't anything I found annoying in Luminosity - you no doubt filtered those features out for us.
As stated here, I think the flaw is misplaced emphasis. There's nothing missing, and nothing I find truly extraneous for the story Meyer chose to tell - she just lingers over weaker portions.
I guess someone other than Alicorn should also answer this.
It's competently written and pretty enjoyable, but not as much as Methods of Rationality.
I haven't read so much as a word from the novels nor watched so much as a trailer from any of the movies, and had successfully avoided learning anything about the contents except the names of the two protagonists and that it's a paranormal romance with sparkling vampires and werewolves (I despise paranormal romances and vampire fiction in general). I had no trouble at all following along, and the world managed to not come across as exceptionally stupid, contrary to the very vague second hand impressions I had, despite apparently canon compliant world building. It starts a bit slow but is pretty engaging despite the long introspective monologues, which must be difficult to pull off. It's much more down to earth than Methods of Rationality, nowhere near as crazy, doesn't contain as much humor and is much more even in tone.
I liked this a lot more than HP:MOR, despite the fact that I never found luminosity sequence all that interesting. I'm thinking I should reread it, though. I've never read or seen anything twilight-related prior to reading this fanfic. It's well written, light and enjoyable.
I love the fic. HP:MOR is alternatively brilliant and cringeworthy but this is consistently well-written. And sometimes poignant. Hopefully I'll get around to write a review at some point. For now, just some thoughts on blood.
I would expect Bella to try hard to find ways to satisfy her hunger more satisfactorily. Some things she could plausibly look into:
Since some animals taste better than others, which one tastes best? Do hominids taste any good? Or maybe some predator which vampires might rarely encounter? Killer whales?
Are there any ways to process/cook/spice animal blood so that it tastes less bad?
Is there a way to synthesize a yummy blood substitute? This would be an ambitious research/engineering project but with immortality, you might as well get started.
Are there any ways to obtain human blood which Bella might find ethically satisfactory? Edward used to kill bad guys, maybe that's worth at least thinking about? What about people that are dying anyway? People in a permanent vegitative state? Braindead people?
How about blood donations? Humans can, and frequently do, donate a significant amount of blood without negative effects on their well being. If stealing blood intended for medical purposes is too unethical, then perhaps you could get some human friends to donate yummy blood now and then? I'm sure the world has a lot of vampire fans who would be happy to do that. If the Volturi keep human fan girls around, then maybe there is some realistic way for you to do it too? And if it's hard to get a significant amount of blood then maybe you could at least have enough to indulge on special occasions? Or maybe you could mix a little human blood with a lot of animal blood and get something that tastes significantly better than your normal meal?
Of course there are reasons why none of these ideas might work out (e.g. gorillas might actually taste pretty good but they're rare and somewhat unethical to kill; a bit of human blood now and then might just drive you crazy for more etc.) but Bella is the kind of person I would expect to look into things like this before accepting a life (an eternal life, no less) of unsatiable cravings. We already know that there are fairly obvious things (like drinking water) which her vampire family has never thought of trying so she probably wouldn't just think "someone would have noticed".
Edit: I see the point about donated blood was already raised below and explained away in the way I guessed.
She is? I think you just convinced me to have a read!
Well, this Bella is an Alicornist - she's introspective and with a problem-solving mentality. In some ways, this fic is a better sell for Alicornism than HP:MOR (which I also like) is for EY's ideas. For one thing, Bella feels like a perfectly plausible 17 year old girl. She's not a prodigy and doesn't have any active magical abilities. It's easy to identify with her and the fic plausibly shows her as the equal of very powerful supernatural beings, just by virtue of adhering to Alicornism.
"Alicornist?" "Alicornism?" Can we try not to use these sorts of terms?
I meant "Alicornist" as a, perhaps slightly playful, shorthand for "person who adheres to [some important subset of] the ideas of Less Wrong user Alicorn as laid out in her sequence on living luminously". If this terminology is felt to be unclear, offensive or objectionable in some other way, I am certainly willing to not use it again. I'd appreciate an explanation, though.
Well, first off, the terms "luminous" and "luminosity" already exist and serve the same purpose, so it's needlessly confusing to invent new terms that mean the same thing or close to the same thing. Secondly, identifying yourself or others with terms at all is generally undesirable, as it promotes several irrational thought processes. I'm actually in the process of writing a top-level post on this subject, and that has me in focus mode, so apologies if I seem unnecessarily picky.
And they're worse. Specifically they are ingroup jargon with a well known outgroup meaning that looks somewhere between an amusing non-sequitur and arrogant. "You're claiming to glow?"
<Person>ist is at least a recognizable English language template.
Given that "alicorn" is a word, I think "Alicornist" is also ingroup jargon. You'd have to know who I am to understand it. Otherwise it's "do you worship unicorn horns or something?"
It's a word that I had to Google, and I have a medium-large vocabulary. "Luminous" is not. You are third in the search results. I think it would easily be seen as a name.
Don't forget about Google's annoying tendency to give you relevant search results.
Our Alicorn is second, third, sixth, and seventh on the search results for Alicorn here, not counting "in your social circle".
I feel like the word for someone who practices my general belief system should be "unicorn".
So if I adopted your beliefs that would mean only virgins could touch me? Sounds like that would lead to a LOT of one night stands! ;)
So mote it be! Bella is not only a sparkly vampire - she is also a unicorn. Take that, Twilight haters!
Carnivores taste better than herbivores; omnivores are presumably in between. I implied, although perhaps not strongly enough, that Edward tried a shark; it was more or less in line with predators in general. There's not enough variance to expect there to be a particularly excellent species somewhere. Individual vampires have preferences within animalspace but there's no way to predict what Bella will like best until she's sampled a few kinds.
Nope. It's best straight out of the jugular.
Maybe. Bella's probably going to start something along these lines once she can stand being around human blood - she wants to figure out what there is in human blood that makes it tasty. (Carlisle could start something like this, but while he's a fine character and whatnot, he does not have an experimental mindset, and would be unlikely to give up large chunks of his time to satisfy this interest of Bella's. For example, instead of thinking about what might cause vampire venom to cause turning, and then getting a lot of it directly into Edward's heart when he was administering his first turn, he settled for recreating the bites he himself had received. This, it turns out, made the process unnecessarily drawn out.)
Your other questions have, as you noted, been addressed.
Thank you, I appreciate the reply. I didn't mean that I was curious about the answers to those questions, as such. My only concern was that I felt it would be in character for Bella to be asking questions like these. And, as your answers imply, I'm sure she will - she's only just turned and the problem would have been less salient to her before.
Does the boar's blood taste better because of biochemical similarities between humans and pigs?
No, Bella just happens to like them a bit more than other animals (except, as per latest update, orca whales.) Emmett's favorite is bear and Edward prefers mountain lion.
Oh, there is a yummy killer whale in the latest update! That was sweet of you.
What's sweet about including the killer whale?
I asked you if killer whales were tasty and then there was a tasty killer whale in the next update. This elicited a small, pleasant emotional reaction in me which I can try to verbalize as follows: "oh, I guess I had a tiny impact on that story I like - it's sweet of Alicorn to interact with her fans in this way".
I thought of the possibility that you had the chapter written already and the whale was a mere coincidence but I thought that was unlikely enough that I could proceed on the assumption that it was not the case.
I'm overexplaining - in my defence it's been my experience that the type of verbosity I am prone to finds a less unwelcome audience on Less Wrong than most other places.
I wouldn't say the coincidence was unlikely. The honeymoon location was carried over from canon and in such a setting killer whales are the obvious choice of food. They are more or less carnivorous dolphins. You cannot get too much higher on the "similar to humans and eat a lot of meat" criteria.
But you still have cause to be flattered. Great minds think alike and all that!
That's interesting - while I don't object on principle to reacting like that to reader comments, and hadn't already written ch. 32, I don't have a memory of consciously choosing to include killer whales because of your question. In my head it looked like I was going, "Well, they're on an island, Bella would rather not hunt close to humans, somebody would probably be annoyed with me if they ate dolphins... what's the range on killer whales? Oh, those things are all over the place, that's what's for dinner." But of course I read your question, and you probably primed me.
I've just started the Luminosity series. Reading a whole 30 chapters online was slightly daunting so I'm experimenting with listening to it in audio format so I can listen to it at the gym, etc. I found a suitable high quality voice that sounds like a young female. The 'Daniel' voice I had just sounded too bizarre reading a female first person narrative.
Once I'm finished with Luminosity I may try listening to some of Eliezer's sequences - the non illustrated ones obviously!
Some of the notebook portions may not come through properly in audio - I'm thinking particularly of a bit with strikethroughs in chapter 3, which the ff.net version doesn't even have because they don't allow strikethrough and I had to rewrite the section. So any bits that don't sound like complete sentences are likely due to that.
Ahh, that explains why I had no problems with chapter three then. I built my playlist by using a FanFiction.net scraper that presented the entire story thus far in a text file, split it into numbered files using the "##" chapter delimiter and then bulk converted the 30 text files into mp3s.
That's an elegantly constructed website.
I just noticed you have released chapter 31 too. (Perhaps consider creating a shortened version of the title for the FF.net version btw. :: Title too long ::)
Thanks :D On my to-do list, after I have buffers in place for all my works (hahahaha), is to code a black-text-on-white version that people can switch to, so there will be fewer objections to its use, because I really really hate ff.net.
I typed "title too long" in there on purpose; it's not an automatic insertion. I guess I could truncate it, but it's just so infuriating that I have to do things like that in order to play nice with the website. Hate hate hate.
FWIW, I prefer white-on-black. Monitors aren't paper.
Which is also far more appropriate in the context... it's supposed to be dark and there is supposed to be red involved somewhere on the page!
I like it too, but people have complained. White-on-black will remain the default; I just want to make it possible to switch.
My reason for preferring plain black-on-white: makes it less conspicuous to read at work.
As an interim solution, try http://luminous.elcenia.com/story/luminosity##.html where ## is the chapter number. This is where I upload the files with the text, and then they go wherever else they need to be via file include.
Thanks. I did read you mentioning that trick, but it's good to be reminded.
I see your posts appear via the RSS feed, which currently contains a title and a one sentence summary. If you changed the configuration to include the whole chapter text into the feed, that would neatly obviate the problem.
I'll do a little testing and see if I can make it take file includes there. Pasting would leave the problem that the feed would require separate correction if I fix a typo or something.
Edit: I just tried a test of this and it didn't work. If anyone knows how to make RSS feeds accept file includes, please let me know (it'd be useful for Elcenia, too! HTHT already sends the new comic page through the feed, but that's just an image.)
I've had the same thought
When the Luminosity vampires carry someone, in particular when they accelerate to a high speed, do they accelerate their passenger using conventional force or is the acceleration magic applied directly to the load? If unspecified I usually assume that superhumans can accelerate objects via implicit magic. That eliminates all sorts of potential irritations reading most such stories.
There are certainly textual references to not carrying someone too fast for fear of hurting them. Are there other irritations?
I haven't been irritated by Luminosity. I'm just pinning down some of the physics of this particular counter-factual world.
I don't really understand your question. I'm not invoking "acceleration magic"; vampires just move very fast.
I usually try to give myself a legitimate reason to suspend disbelief. Things working differently in the counter-factual world are not distracting, they are just accepted as premises. In some stories things are explicitly not presented as premises of the world still seem to happen.
I like 'vampires just move very fast'. In terms of what the 'just' entails it seems that, for example, "just have the ability to output large amounts of power from the muscles and thereby cause acceleration through the application of force upon items in the environment" would be a rather ungainly. A somewhat more nebulous 'just' fits better for this kind of story.
This was prompted by thinking of the optimal way to protect a human passenger in the event of an automotive accident. If I was a lightweight version of Cameron - super strong and super fast but otherwise operating under completely standard physics - then I wouldn't choose Edward's passenger protection strategy. There are all sorts of other options which would require lower concentrations of force on the human's body over time and space. But with the kind of strength and speed exhibited by the vampires in either Twilight or True Blood the approach seems to fit perfectly. They are 'just' really fast, for a specific kind of 'just'.
Vampires do not exceed the speed of sound. They are not even as fast as ordinary airplanes or really fast cars, or they'd have no reason to use either barring subterfuge purposes and a fondness for vehicles. So no, no sonic boom. But over short distances, even going 100 mph would mean crossing a football field in a third of a second, if my back-of-envelope bad-at-math calculation is right. Bit quick for a human to follow. (They don't take any appreciable time to start up and slow down when they aren't trying to.)
Vampires that don't care much about looking human often go barefoot; this is mentioned with James's coven. Cullens do wear shoes. However, they not only move very quickly and strongly: they move precisely. Bella's shown jumping out a high window in book 4 of canon in high heels and finding it as easy as taking a step on a normal floor. (Easier, probably, because human!Bella can find excuses to trip on ordinary floors and no vampire would ever trip on anything.) I imagine they can wear out shoes like nobody's business, but if they care about them (which they may or may not, depending on how annoying it is to get new ones, since money is no object) they can probably arrange to plant their feet in shoe-preserving ways.
I specified that the tree wasn't rotted when Alice picked it out. Wood can take a fair amount of knocking about. She could leave prints in it if she didn't take care in her handling, but that would have interrupted her show. Note also that this is Alice in particular, who, if she cared about not breaking the tree, could see where it would be best to grab and catch it.
In canon, vampires are not described as leaving remarkable footprints or kicking up soil even when they're running all-out playing baseball. This does seem odd. I don't have a good explanation for it unless they're doing something like the way Jesus lizards walk on water. I'm not planning to explore it in the story, though.
It occurred to me even as I asked the question that just by asking it I would be locking myself in to hearing the answer. I suspect Bella would have deleted the question rather than post it were she in my shoes. ;)
Do you regard math as difficult? If so, one trick I've learned is to restate any math problem you see as one about paperclips instead, but make sure you know the mapping to the original problem. This will make it a lot easier to find the answer!
So Bella is actually stronger than the Cullens? That's a new twist! I've never encountered a vampire myth in which newborns were not significantly weaker than vampires a couple of decades old and those vampires in turn not significantly weaker than centenarians.
How much of this greater strength relates to the Cullen's self-sabotaging diet? None of the Cullen's seemed particularly intimidated by James, Laurent or Victoria so I take it that the difference between 'vegetarian' and carnivorous vampires is less significant than the difference between carnivores and newborns.
Is there any particular advantage to being a 1,000 year old vampire in this world? Just the experiences, skills and allies you have accumulated? Gradually improving witchcraft powers?
Is it a net disadvantage to be ancient? Some deal with translucent skin and bad eyesight? Or were the Vorturi weird in some different way?
To be honest I find the prospect of a world of vampires in a female targeted reality not gaining power with age rather surprising!
Correct. Drinking human blood out of newborn phase makes vampires stronger, but only a little bit, and it makes them worse at certain sorts of thinking - it's almost a tossup in a fight. Newborns are much stronger than non-, and (unless, as I interpret the situation, they have advance warning of the turning process) much less clearheaded.
Experiences, skills, and allies are definitely nontrivial. Control improves with time, although anthropophagic vampires value that considerably less. Witchcraft is shown in canon to improve over time with practice... for Bella. (It's implied that one of the Denalis has also gotten better at his considerably less flashy power, or rather better at interpreting what it tells him. If you count Carlisle's immunity to human blood as a power, he's improved a lot over the centuries.) It's not clear whether this is because most vampires are happy with what they get and don't work on it, or because most witchcraft isn't readily improved upon.
It's never outright stated whether the Volturi's weird skin and eyes actually confer physical disadvantages, and I haven't decided how to cash it out in Luminosity yet. Some even older vampires who ruled before the Volturi did, in book 4, consider it a sign of complacency or something, and say that they used to have the same traits but they've since been reversed with their deposition.
Thanks for the explanation. Compared to some other fictional realities I have investigated Twilight seems relatively harder to find practical descriptions of.
Now that is fascinating. I saw some reference to the two Romanian vampires who survived when the Volturi overthrew them and it got me curious. If the Romanians actually had the cataracts and weird skin but lost in due to improved behavioural patterns or perhaps with the change in status, well, that is the sort of thing that makes me tempted to go ahead and read the Twilight books myself to pick up hints.
But I suspect I would find Twilight unbearable now, having just absorbed 31 chapters of Luminosity. I love the Luminosity characters and it would be infuriating to have them revert to fools.
I hope that in writing Luminosity I haven't discouraged anyone from reading Twilight. They are flawed books, it's true. But the biggest flaw is misplaced emphasis, I think. They have the resources, embedded in the text, to be truly fantastic; as it is they're mostly just easy and pleasant reads, because Meyer pays attention to the weaker parts of her characterization and world. It is my guess that if you've read Luminosity, it will encourage you to read the canon books the way I first read them, automatically sifting through the content to get the good parts and mentally apologizing for the bad parts.
luminous!Bella doesn't bear the same relationship to canon!Bella that rational!Harry bears to canon!Harry. canon!Harry could not have become rational!Harry - MoR couldn't be a single point of departure fic. Too much else is in the mix. Whereas canon!Bella, making a handful of different choices when she was nine or ten or eleven, could have become luminous!Bella, and changed everything. (All the other characters are the same, changed only insofar as my copying is imperfect and insofar as they react to a different Bella.)
If you like, think of canon Twilight as slightly inferior, thematically different fanfiction of Luminosity :P
I like that framing. I may just do that. :)
I just read through the first few chapters and have the same quibble that I had with HP:MOR. Namely, the protagonist's successes don't seem to be caused by her rationality at all.
The first few chapters hug very close to canon. I didn't start messing with it until #4 or so.
I read up to chapter 10. It seems the whole game was decided before Bella ever got the chance to use her luminosity skills - the important factor was her being opaque to Edward, am I wrong? (I never read Twilight so this is my first exposure to the characters.)
Sorry if my standards are too high. I just get a little frustrated when Eliezer claims Harry's successes are due to his rationality, when they obviously aren't. How many of us have prophecies about us? So too with Bella, her rationality isn't what makes her special.
"The whole game"? What in particular are you referring to?
Edward wouldn't have become interested in her, and nothing would have happened.
Even if she weren't opaque, she'd still be extra-yummy-smelling and still have caused upheaval in Edward's life. Whether her opacity is really the reason she didn't get turned into a tasty snack is a question I've chosen not to address. I think the opacity exacerbated, but was not necessary for, Edward finding her romantically compelling.
But extra yumminess isn't caused by rationality either! (Or is it? Maybe I'm missing some important detail here.)
(No, it isn't.)
Are you saying that you won't be happy with rationalist fiction unless there is nothing else about the character that's special?
If we're talking about wish-fulfillment fiction, I'd like most of the fulfillment to be causally attributable to rationality rather than some other quality (especially inborn).
It seems I made this point on LW many times, but few people agree. Oh well. The first time was my response to Yvain's recommendation of R. Scott Bakker. So I'm not singling you out for criticism, if that makes any difference.
Given Bella's inquisitive nature it seems likely that she would have found a way to immortality even without being super-vamp-bait.
It may also have been interesting if Luminosity was written from the perspective of a different character altogether. Perhaps Amanda. Not having been spoon fed immortal connections from day one while still being likely exposed to the risks of vampire attacks would be something of a challenge. Then she could develop her own more custom made vampire talent rather than inheriting Bella's (rather boring) one.
While it arguably contradicts canon, I like to think it's Bella's luminosity in Luminosity that caused the weird vampire talent. Her mind is just special.
You don't think there could be a some kind of talent that is more directly associated with luminosity than being unreadable? Bella's thoughts, motives and feelings do not appear to be at all hard to read by conventional means. In fact, she seems to make a more than typical effort to make herself transparent.
Something Bella does seem to be good at is analysing the future impact of her decisions. That could lead to a more self-focussed version of Alice's talent. You could quite reasonably just palm off Bella's ability to Alice and use a modified version of Alice's talent for a fanfiction protagonist. Of course, if Bella's ability actually was closely related to luminosity it would defeat a lot of the point of the story. If she was luminous via super-power then we wouldn't be able to watch her putting in the effort to be self aware and rational manually. She would probably also experience a similar effect to Edward. He lost his ability to empathise effectively when he became a mind reader.
I was implying that she was super-powered via luminosity, which I don't think informs the same concern.
Canon has her with the same talent (although luminous!Bella will develop hers along a different trajectory now that she's been vamped). It's not because she's luminous. It's just a magic thingamabob.
Right, that's the aspect that I thought contradicted canon. I can just pretend that canon doesn't exist, and the real reason in Luminosity isn't a magic thingamabob.
I don't agree that nothing would have happened. Just probably nothing involving vampires.
Just as Harry, without a prophecy, would have grown up to found the Singularity Institute. You just wouldn't be reading a story about him.
Is this a Harry with or without the magic genes and magical parents?
Either way I would like to think that a rational Harry would end up becoming aware of the magical world and explore the potential of magical means to fulfil his universe optimising objectives.
I would.
Relevant threads: 1, 2.
It does seem to become progressively more relevant. While it isn't luminosity that made Bella a witch or Edward's pseudo soul-mate, those skills become relevant when she uses them to navigate the world from that starting point. We can see Luminosity diverge from canon as Bella makes sensible decisions. For example, I think she wiped out the whole plot line for book two while simultaneously navigating herself and the Cullens away from the most idiotic decisions they made in book 1.
"Luminosity" isn't Bella's only skill and it isn't responsible for determining her starting position but it is worth following her along as she models approximately sane decision making skills while encountering progressively more difficult challenges.
And book 3. And some major details of book 4, although she hasn't precluded the broad contour of the story.
Ok. Is that something to do with getting the Volturi on side and avoiding a lot of the trouble there by becoming vamped? I picked up on Victoria creating an army of newborns for the purpose plotting vengeance but only loose impressions of the plot thereafter.
I've just been listening to the early parts of Twilight, by the way, and I can see why luminosity!Bella was so adamant with her boundaries regarding pointless mysteriousness. Cannon!Bella rewards obnoxious behaviour with the granting of status and signals of attraction. Fairly believable of an exaggerated gender typical female character but still somewhat pathetic in large doses. Really, being vague, communicating abysmally and being generally inconsistent needn't be all that impressive.
Victoria is the Big Bad in books 2 and 3 both. In Luminosity, she dies before she has the chance to make a nuisance of herself. No one's kicking around in Luminosity at this time who seriously wants vengeance on Bella (at least now...)
Yeah, canon!Bella is much more tolerant across all sorts of dimensions than luminous!Bella. The latter is more selfish, more prickly, more inclined to wash her hands of things that don't seem worth the trouble. Alice didn't have to give canon!Edward strict instructions about how to treat canon!Bella, because there's basically nothing he could do to drive her off.
Did Bella just eliminate a whole other plot with a single sentence? (At the end of chapter 32.)
The only plot I can think of which that sentence would have eliminated, was already up in flames the minute Bella turned.
She gave forewarning to expect a half-vampire birth. Obviously Bella isn't going to give birth to a child herself but if she does in fact use the eggs Rosalie harvested then the child presents the same risk of being misunderstood. If the Volturi have forewarning it will not be necessary to call witnesses to prove that Edward and Bella's surrogate offspring is not an immortal child.
I had wondered whether Bella would want her children to be (biologically) fathered by a sperm donor or by Edward. While a half-vampire pregnancy does seem problematic the alternative would be to have a child that is vulnerable to death for 17 years and then must endure 3 days of living hell. I assume Bella would prefer the half vampire child if a suitable surrogate volunteered.
On the other hand Bella man not want to put a human through a traumatic pregnancy and prefer a human child that will later be turned. In that case it would be time for Edward and Bella to tour the world, with Edward scanning every male they encounter, looking for the most powerful man-witch they can find!
Note that in this point in Luminosity, Bella has absolutely no reason to believe that half-vampires are possible - and neither have the Volturi.
Also, it's Rosalie, not Rosemary.
Just whatever her prior is for that sort of thing working (maybe 0.3 or so). It's the sort of thing I would expect her to test before she tried anything herself!
Although it sounds more practical to hold off on that sort of thing until you have taken over the world.
A man-witch: it's more than a sandwich!
"Links" on the luminous.elcenia.com site is broken.
Now it's not.
Chapter 32.
As a rabid fan of Emily Short's Galatea, I squeed uncontrollably at Bella pretending to be a statue in a shipping crate.
It occurs to me that Antarctica would be a ridiculously well-suited place to establish a long-term vegetarian vampire settlement, once that community grew to about a hundred or so. It's very well-separated from any human settlement and likely to remain so for a long time, so it's safe for newborns, unlikely to invite accidents, and little chance of needing to move. It's totally habitable to vampires, and there's plenty of local fauna to munch on. If the politics with the Volturi could be worked out, it could become feasible to start turning people systematically.
Bella has counterfactual speed dial. I love the Alice character. :)
I'm looking forward to Bella getting into a fight. It occurs to me that Bella has one of the most significant combat oriented powers around, at least for the next year or so. Newborn strength without loss of control. It'd be a shame for her to waste that by not getting attacked unawares at least once!
Nah, Alice could beat her up. Alice is fun in a fight - she just dances around and you never land a hit.
It's amazing that the Vorturi haven't had Alice killed already. She's the most dangerous being alive. Apart from Bella, whose most dangerous ability is being able to use Alice effectively while also protecting Alice from magical attacks.
The only reason for them not to have tried to kill Alice is because they are are too scared they will fail and end up on her bad side.
No, they haven't killed Alice because they desperately, desperately want to collect her.
Oh, I had the impression that they had given up on the 'recruit pretty much the entire Cullen family' efforts.
Zey have vays of making you join. This is part of the driving force of the plot in books 3 and 4, although it's a little subtle.
Ahh, Chelsea. That, combined with political and military strength, the ability to brain-torture folk at will and Aro's ability to detect anyone 'faking it' sounds like a solid recruitment system.
Yup, Bella needs to kill them all quick smart. Too dangerous to let them live.
I have been thinking about the relative capacities of Alice and Edward in combat situations.
In a direct matchup it would seem that Edward has the upper hand. Alice can see the outcomes of everything that either of them decide to do and Edward can read that information as part of what Alice is thinking. Essentially that puts them on equal footing with respects to mind powers and they are left with a fight that is as transparent as chess. That leaves Edward with an advantage based off mere physical traits. But IQ could tip that balance.
When it comes to fighting other combatants I speculate:
Bella, Alice, and Edward form rock-paper-scissors.
I take it that you are referring to Bella's newborn strength? As in:
Alice >>> Bella (foresight)
newborn!Bella > Edward (newborn strength without newborn loss of control > slight speed bonus and a century of practice)
Edward > normal!Bella (speed, strength and experience)
Edward > Alice (faster and stronger and slightly more experienced)
I guess in a couple of years a cycle would require the introduction of a fourth, such as:
Alice > normal!Bella
normal!Bella > Alec
Alec > Edward
Edward > Alice
Of course Edward is somewhat redundant. Alec seems like he should be able to beat just about everyone who isn't Bella.
rationalist!Alec: "Hey, um... Boss... remember that time where my sister and I decimated the Romanians and allowed you to usurp their position as rulers of the vampire world? And you know how you maintain that power now because either Jane or I could singlehandedly destroy most covens? Well that chick is immune to both of us and yourself even while she is human. If you can recruit her you will get a new guard with a handy trick. If she turns you she could kill us all! A reward that would be a mere luxury and a risk that you cannot afford... do the math!"
Although it's not demonstrated in the books, Edward can in theory get around Alec. Alec's power works slowly and moves through space; by reading where it's going to be, Edward could just get out of the way. Jane's faster, so he can get gotten by her. Jane cannot, however, singlehandedly destroy a coven, because she's limited to one target at a time and not especially powerful physically.
I take it that the same applies to Alice? I assume she gets her foresight at the same time that Edward gets his mind reading. That would leave her vulnerable to Jane but not (overwhelmingly) vulnerable to Alec.
How fast can Jane switch targets? Is it crucio Fred... then switch to crucio George and Fred gets up while George falls down in pain? Or does she need to recharge?
Either way crucio; molotov jumps out as her obvious default combat strategy (where prisoners are not desired). Vampire reflexes would (I assume) make flame based projectiles mostly ineffective against vampires that haven't been incapacitated but stunning opens up the mundane 'burn them' option.
I'm not versed in typical vampire combat strategy. Do they make use of fire sources in melee? Flaming torches through to conventional flame throwers may not be useful if the wind from fast travel blows them out but things like oxyacetalyne cutting-torches may be hot enough to handle the pace of vampire combat. These may be best exploited by Wolves given their ability to handle the inevitable splash damage without going up in flames.
Vampires may be better off with incendiary ammunition. Even tracer rounds would at least sting a little. If Alec is as slow as you suggest it sounds like he would be outright irrelevant against any serious opponent. He would have posed a real threat if he could work instantly without travelling through space.
Being a vampire sounds like serious fun!
Jane seems to be able to switch targets as quickly as she can change who she's looking at. She can attack many times in rapid succession with no apparent need for recharge.
Alice would have some ability to dodge Alec too. However, in a serious fight, where everybody's in melee, Alec isn't usually deployed - the fact that the power moves through ordinary space means he can hit allies just as easily if they're in the way. He's very useful if you don't know he's coming or if you're still trying diplomacy while the Volturi have decided that you need to be dead.
Vampires are not shown to use fire in the heat of battle (pun intended). They use it only to destroy defeated opponents - you shred the bad guy, then gather up all his pieces into a pile and set it alight. My guess is that non-vampire objects simply do not move through the air fast enough or undetectably enough to hit one that's still moving around. So when they fight, they get up close and personal, and they bite and crush and tear. I suppose you could kill vampires if you had a way to explode and ignite them and a large area around them all at once, so it could probably be done, but you'd need time to plant the dynamite.
Bullets? Normally they wouldn't be much use but incendiary rounds with a sufficient firing rate should be effective in the space of time when the opponent is closing. Their closer proximity and forward progress makes it unlikely that they would be able to dodge. Especially against a team of 4 standing side by side. Recent developments in technology like that is something that is unlikely to have been fully investigated and probably has potential uses that have not been considered due to how useless guns used to be.
Not even melee weapons? For example, swords or even heavy gauntlets made of tungsten carbide? Anything to add weight to a strike. Relative to their strength vampires are incredibly light and the extra kinetic energy would make a huge difference.
Vampires literally limiting themselves to biting, crushing and tearing with only their bodies as weapons is better explained by a combination of narrative appeal, animal instincts and tradition than by considered evaluation of optimal tactics.
Incidentally, just how durable is a vampire? Obviously they are able to damage each other and wolves and werewolves seem to be able to kill them from time to time. Even Carlisle's father apparently hunted them. Where do they fit in relative to, well, any material known to man?
It doesn't seem that vampires are a great deal more flammable than, say, humans. I'm not sure if an incendiary round would catch.
i will, at any rate, not be including guns in the story even if it makes sense, because I really, really, really hate them and gosh darn it I am doing this because it's fun.
Swords would probably break - really durable gauntlets have potential, although I've got enough other things to throw at Bella that she's not going to have a chance to get down to weapons research for at least a while.
It's not clear exactly how durable a vampire is. They are not endangered by car crashes even at very high speed. Edward claims in canon that he could kick out the wall of an out-of-control airplane and jump out without hurting himself, while carrying Bella, without getting her killed. Given the opportunity, one vampire can dismantle another without serious taxation of strength - there's no vampire shown who definitely couldn't take apart an incapacitated foe.
They are composed in such a way that sharpness matters - vampire teeth can pierce vampire skin in a bitey way rather than merely in a crushy way, and venom is the only thing that leaves a scar. (Thence Jasper's.) Werewolves are supernaturally fast and strong and sharp and whatnot too, so it's unclear how much we can extrapolate from their ability to contend with vampires. (It does seem like one vampire versus one Quileute-type werewolf will usually mean a win for a vampire except under special circumstances, like the vampire being distracted for a moment by nearby blood. Wolves come in packs, though, and fight together with far greater efficiency than a coven of vamps does.) We have almost no information on Children of the Moon.
Good show, reduced my Harry withdrawal a bit, though not hitting all the same achy spots.
Here's to Rosalie totally having thought of offing Bella and conveniently appropriating, err, adopting, her eggs.
Nice catch.
Why doesn't Rosalie ask for some eggs? Bella should have plenty after all... there was no reason not to harvest as many as possible before she moved on to unlife. Bella is a perfect candidate - she is fairly hot and has witchcraft genes. But if Bella wasn't inclined to share then any other female human.
I was actually a little surprised that Rosalie's name didn't crop up at all in chapter 34. It turned out that Bella and Edward were both happy enough to become parents but in that spectrum between "just doing it to save Gianna" and "desperate to raise half-vamp spawn" there was the possibility of offering the privilege to Rosalie. That would reduce risk of resentment, transfer an awful lot of unpleasant responsibilities (for the time being) and still leave you a biological parent and adoptive aunt.
Rosalie doesn't want someone else's kid or she would already have adopted at this point. It's not like there are no abandoned infants that rich white couples can scoop up and care for if that's what she wanted to do. I'm not saying she wouldn't take an egg if Bella offered, but the way things work in Rosalie's head is that Bella should be the mom to Bella's biological kids. Rosalie is thrilled about this prospect, and would certainly dote on such kids, but as an aunt.
huh?
I hadn't even considered the possibility until you verified that Rosalie thought of offing Bella and adopting the eggs...
Well, if Bella were dead, then she couldn't be her kids' mom. Rosalie would remain an aunt, but a primary-caregiver aunt instead of an occasional-caregiver aunt. Less competition for the child's attention.
Edit: And it's not like the only reason Rosalie considered offing Bella was for egg-related reasons. Remember, Rosalie doesn't like being a vampire, she would have wanted someone to kill her when she asked. Bella's situation is different - better - in several ways, but insofar as Rosalie understands Bella by analogy to herself, it seems like it might be in Bella's interests to die instead of turning.
This just occurred to me: is Bella breaking her spine a reference to the original?
In canon, Bella starts turning with a broken spine, although not at the neck - about halfway down. It heals itself partway through. I got the idea from there.
It is a real shame that Alice's power doesn't work on hybrids. That would have been perfect for eugenics.
"I'm going to pick this one!"
"No, she's a brat."
"This one?"
"Bad temper. Eats her classmates in temper tantrums."
"How about..."
"Dude. Down syndrome. Count the damn chromosomes! Hey, the next one. Use that. He'll be able to shoot laser beams out his eyes!"
But even with the no-hybrid limitation on foresight it will still be worthwhile pursuing Alice based genetic research. A simple option is collecting various sources of human sperm and getting foresight into how each egg of Bella's would turn out with each of 100 possible fathers. That will give plenty of scope for selecting in favour of useful traits, even if you still have to rely on luck with respect to selecting Edward's sperm.
If Rosalie wants to eventually become an adoptive parent too she will have the chance to create a real 'designer baby'.
While I don't want to downplay the effect of genetics on personality, Alice's thwarting by people's choices mean that she wouldn't be able to see far enough ahead to give any better information than "spits up a lot" and "hey, this one sleeps through the night pretty early".
The first thing I thought when Ilario wasn't showing too many signs of pain was that he was just used to being closer to the threshold of pure agony than Bella was. He's been slowly dying of cancer for years and endured cancer treatments. Those aren't pleasant. The increase in pain may not seem all that bad, especially when it is accompanied with the knowledge that now the pain is actually going to end!
Wait a minute. Gold standard for humane turning? That's got to be "Use Alec".
Well, yes, but it's not like you can hire Alec to come out for a long weekend and do a turning gig, he's a Volturi. In practice, he's the gold standard for humane executions.
Slightly forced discovery on Edwards part, but understandable that one wants to introduce the hybrid stuff somehow, and there's little room for a happy accidental discovery in this storyline. "Hey, let's test it for the heck of it" maybe, but that'd also be going against a rather strong base assumption that's hard to plausibly question, since the whole thing, well, is rather implausible anyway. ;)
Good to have some more, anyway, and nice going with the compartmentalization and getting into touch with Billy. Swell way to put "I'd very much like you guys to eat them for breakfast" at the end. Looking forward to the "friendship" blooming.
Hey, I just wanted to say I'm on Ch. 10 and really like the fic so far.
Also, I wish to clarify that I am Definitely Not A Vampire. Look, I even eat garlic ice-cream!
(Pay no heed to kodos96's vile slander.)
With respect to 'alpha of the pack' considerations am I right in inferring that Twilight 'Wolves' differ from actual wolves in as much as they actually have an 'alpha' rather than an 'alpha pair'? Descriptions I've seen from the Twilight universe seem to be more in line with, say gorilla social structure than wolf social structure.
I would blame any tendencies towards patriarchy on the primate side not the 'wolf' side of the magic (or just on Meyer).
Right, it's a single alpha, not a pair.
Hypothesis: fairy tales originally come from accounts of vampires.
Assuming that fairy-tale nobility are Twivamps explains so much. They can "live happily ever after" because they're genuinely deathless; they're supernaturally beautiful; the beautiful peasant-girl that the noble prince falls in love with is turned, the magically healing kiss is actually a bite (or maybe just a kiss -- vampires have venom instead of saliva, right?); they fall in love at first sight and stay that way forever.
Prince Charming is a vampire.
Not necessarily. Especially if, say, the relevant gene turns out to be X-linked and dominant. Surprisingly, if that was the case then finding out that their dad was also a wolf would actually lower the probability they should assign to finding that Jacob was a wolf!
There's a typo in this chapter: "Leah Clearwater, who had the sort of eyelashes that other women medicated themselves to get, was skeptical. But she followed Leah into the forest readily enough, shook my hand with only the barest hesitation..." Unless I'm misparsing it somehow.
Fixed.
Another typo?
Nodded?
No, I meant "noted". Perhaps the sentence would be clear with more commas. Eleazar notes, aloud, that Heidi does not project a sexual attraction, and so notes in response to Bella's question.
Bella probably needn't worry too much. I suspect that after hundreds of years of vampire speed enhanced and sleep-free years I'd relish the chance to borrow someone else's goals to achieve for a while if they were willing to share them with me!
Are there any turned too-old-to-become-Quileute-werewolf vampires in canon? Because I'm hoping that Mr. Clearwater will have some interesting powers... :)
Canon features no such vampires.
I'm hoping they try it! Perhaps do some blood tests first to see if their is a different reaction to a similar test on normal human blood...
Chapter 39 will introduce a character named "Eleazar". He's canon and in no way inspired by or related to Eliezer. Just wanted to provide a heads up about that because I know someone would ask.
Sounds like Gianna will be the one to persuade Maggie, though feel free not to confirm or deny ;]
Wonder though how a vamp would be so sure of her eventual preference, given that it's a one-time mystical bond. Ah well, perhaps it correlates well.
Although Stephenie Meyer didn't include any gay people in her canon (Maggie is canon, but no remarks whatever are made of her romantic inclinations), she has said that gay humans turn into gay vampires. Also, the whole "mystical bond" thing is never spelled out in so many words in canon, although it is blatantly obvious anyway - it's characterized as simply falling in love. So I decided Maggie's going to be gay in Luminosity, and given that she's aware of this, she has excellent reason to expect her mate to be a girl.
I suspect that Bella's problems trying to figure out how to control vampires would probably solve themselves once she removes the Volturi from power; if the vampires get out of hand, the human governments would notice, and they'd wind up bringing ever-escalating amounts of hardware to defeat them.
If she uses her father to make the appropriate connections with the US law enforcement agencies, she could probably make the transition from vampiric vigilantism to human law enforcement as smooth and painless as possible. He's a police chief; odds are that he knows how to contact the FBI, and they won't play around, especially once she demonstrates her vampiric superpowers.
I was trying to decide if that was feasible, but then I remembered that Carlisle was fighting vampires as a human centuries before.
Well, he was trying, anyway.
...interesting!
What? I summarized Carlisle's turning in chapter 19. His dad had it in for witches, werewolves, and vampires, and got Carlisle to help kill members of that reference class. Now, werewolves and vampires are damn hard to take down, and I never said Carlisle killed any of those, but there are some vulnerable witches in the world. Carlisle did corner a vampire, who turned Carlisle, killed two others, kidnapped a fourth guy, and then got away.
I was under the impression that Carlisle's dad's organization was capable of taking on vampires - it makes much more sense to say that they had ambitions, but that they couldn't without a great deal of luck.
Carlisle's dad was painted as a fanatic who wasn't careful about sorting real vampires (witches, werewolves) from fake vampires (witches, werewolves). He probably offed somebody with porphyria at least once, and some mentally ill folks, and some real witches. Carlisle was more careful and found an actual vampire but couldn't kill it.
And weapons technology has just been getting better and better since then. SWAT team members with antitank weapons are probably capable of wounding vampires, if they hit, and an airstrike from something like an A-10 is likely to be unsurvivable, if the vampire hasn't vacated the area before it arrives.
I haven't stated this explicitly in the story, so that's fair enough, but I think an FBI that became aware of vampires would probably try to make them extinct, not tolerate the ones that are trying real hard now to quit the murder habit.
I sort of doubt that, actually; they're restricted by the rules and laws they're required to follow. They can't arrest someone without evidence; in order to arrest a vampire for eating people, they'd need to be able to connect a particular vampire with particular incidents of people being eaten. At most, they'd be able to kill the vampires that go on open rampages, or which killed law enforcement officers and fled over state lines.
You can't arrest a vampire unless, for some reason, that vampire is willing to be arrested. There is nothing you can do that will keep a live vampire in one place that isn't a) blasting it to smithereens so it takes a while to reassemble or b) getting another vampire to physically hang onto it for you (or if your helpful vampire is Alec, getting him to stare at it magically). Or at least credibly threatening to do one of those things or kill it. The normal rule of law just isn't something you can slap on a vampire and expect it to stick.
Ultimately all of the law is simply the threatened use of force; "Come with us, or suffer the consequences." In this case, they simply don't bother with nonlethal force (barring vampire police officers, which is entirely possible if Bella's working with the government), and go straight to "If you resist arrest, we'll kill you."
I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was entirely possible to construct a prison capable of holding a vampire, either; it'd just take a lot more resources than any individual vampire is likely to possess. Their strength is finite, after all; sufficiently thick steel will be capable of resisting their blows, so a sufficiently durable metal cube with a trough underneath a pipe in the roof (to hold animal blood for them to eat) should be more than capable of holding one more or less indefinitely.
If you pause to make that threat to a vampire, it can probably kill you or escape. They move too quickly for humans to handle. If it can't actually escape, it can probably get a hostage or three so if you set it on fire or attack it with sufficient blunt trauma, an innocent human dies. If the only people around are the folks holding the burny weapons, and those weapons have enough range that the vampire can't get away from where they'll shoot within the human's reaction time (i.e. if you have a circle with a radius of a football field or more ready to go up in flames the instant the vamp moves), well, then you have a credible threat, but how do you transport the vampire to your steel cube without relaxing those conditions?
The steel, btw, doesn't have to break when the vampire hits it. The vampire could just claw at it and tunnel through.
I'm pretty sure the threat would be implicit to the act of asserting governing power over those vampires; it's pretty much implicit in the act of asserting governance over any people, so why would vampires be any different? The only real difference is the difference in the amount of force needed to cow them, which prevents non-lethal captures without their cooperation.
As for burrowing, there are likely solutions for that as well; a sufficiently hard surface treatment would be able to resist scratching by the vampire, while still possessing the lion's share of the ductility of the under-layer. Said surface layer could well also have the property of corrosion resistance, if that's needed to resist vampire venom, as well.
A vampire doesn't need to risk as much collateral damage to fight/contain/kill another vampire. If you've got a vamp running around in Times Square thumbing its nose at the cops, and you are a human who wants to threaten it, you have to be willing to level a few city blocks if it doesn't do what you say. Not so if you are a vampire.
This is true, which is why I'd expect that the government would probably want some of its trusted employees turned, so that they'd be capable of dealing with vampires without needing enough firepower to level the block said vampire happens to be living in.
Volunteers, of course; the process of turning is probably too painful to force someone to do it legally.
You haven't slept for a long time now. Have you made a decision? This can't go on. You have to decide.
How hard a surface is necessary? If vampires can cut diamonds then there's nothing on earth capable of holding one.
It's not specified in canon. I'm going to rule that a newborn vampire can bite through a diamond. (Teeth are special-sharp, plus venom.)
Not sure; I'm not that familiar with the Twilight canon. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of said canon can say what their best feats in this regard are?
That will slow them down, but I don't think it will affect their attitude.