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Giriath comments on Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) Part 2 Discussion Thread - Less Wrong
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Edward is probably completely indifferent to Elspeth right now, but as you said she simply needs to show him that Bella is alive and that she really wants Elspeth to be alive and well. She shouldn't have to show him this through visualization with her witchcraft; he can read her mind and she can talk with absolute sincerity. If he snaps out of it quick enough, he'll probably recognize the threat of Adelaide and either kill, incapacitate or keep her busy while Elspeth and Allirea flee.
The revelation that the Volturi can keep prisoners and make use of their witchcraft like this begs the question of who they have actually killed; is Alice alive perhaps? I'm not sure Elspeth would have time to recognize her in the pandemonium of the prisoners escape, and with all the potential witchcraft present (one could seemingly turn invisible), there's no telling how someone could help her escape unnoticed. Her witchcraft is very powerful so the Volturi would be interested in keeping her, but then again Jasper claims to have felt her die. She may have been considered too powerful and uncooperative to let live.
I think it's one of the Volturi's most stupid mistakes to have such a large collection of unwilling and vengeful witches in one place - and right in their base of operations, no less. Any enemy with knowledge of this and the capability of penetrating the castle and freeing the prisoners will have successfully detonated a bomb of witchcraft on them, and it's possible they're made more pliable by having almost all of their relationships wiped out, so it shouldn't be hard to persuade them to join a rebel army.
On a last note I must say that this story has the most interesting take on 'gifts' -or witchcraft as it's called in this story- of all supernatural Twilight stories I've read. None so far have been ridiculously powerful and they all have limits and counters. Best of all they can be explained and make sense within the Twilight universe. I'd often wondered how it was that Aro could process all the insignificant memories of a being thousand of years old in a mere few moments, and without affecting his own personality. Alicorn's take on that is more reasonable than that he would for example gain an extreme temporary boost in brain-capacity to make sense of all the intake while his gift is active, and this would very likely still affect his personality since he has in essence just experienced everything another individual has.
I don't know about too powerful in the absolute sense, but I do know that her power would definitely let her escape. She could effectively brute-force a plan to escape by thinking about plans to escape. The cost to test a plan's chance of success is effectively nil for her - given enough time (minutes?) she could have a foolproof escape plan.
Plus, once she's escaped and now opposed to the Volturi, she could set up traps for Demetri and other hunters - traps that are basically guaranteed to work.
Remember that there are lots of people running around who completely blank out Alice's visions.
Alice can probably still do a fairly good job of avoiding hunting parties, by deliberately and constantly forecasting on herself (and anyone else she wants to protect) and making some radical change if she sees herself (or other person) going blank for reasons not understood (such as if that person is hanging out around wolves/half-vampires anyway). It would be a security risk to do so, given that a blank Volturi hunting party would not make any different signature than a blank, friendly wolf or half-vampire.
I understand that in canon, Bella is able to shield others as well as herself. Would an Alice being so shielded be able to see wolves/half-vampires? That would be a convenient solution, so probably not.
No. This would almost certainly have been mentioned in canon if it were possible, so it's not.
Yes. And should Alice be alive and out and about to the Volturi's knowledge, then they would probably try to send at least one of these people with every hunting group, to prevent any forewarning visions. I wonder if Alice's visions can't be affected the same as Bella's shield though. If she started believing she should be able to see the half-kinds in her visions would she? - any comments on that Alicorn?
No public comments, no.
Something just occurred to me.
In canon, one of the reasons it was speculated that Alice's visions blanked on half-vamps and werewolves was that she had never been one--she used to be a human, even if she can't remember it, and she was a vampire, but she has never been either of the other two.
But at this point, Elspeth is running around with plenty of memories of at least two half-vamps (including herself) and at least one wolf (as Edward stated that he could read Aro reading Rachel in ch 55 of Luminosity[1]. It's also possible that Aro's touch-telepathy would work through the involuntary telepathy of the wolves to read all of them at once, but that's not highly relevant at this exact moment). She also has the ability to share those memories.
It could be that if Elspeth shares those memories with Alice, Alice will then be able remove those blank spots from her visions, as having years of memories, years of experiences, from these kinds of being that she never has been is enough to overcome that obstacle. Or it could be that despite how much she would remember being a werewolf, she still never actually was a werewolf, any more than she ever was a male, and the blanks would be unaffected. Or it could be that her power works on some other basis completely, and this whole line of inquiry is a dead end, if an interesting one.
[1] I may be mistaken here, as ch 31 of Radiance confirms that Elspeth has Allirea's memories, meaning that Addy read Aro who had read Allirea in the past 5 and a half years, but that might have been before the wolves were captured, which was, I believe, around five years ago...My grasp on the timeline may well be in error here, but I am curious.
Er, wait, when Elspeth blasted Demetri, she hit him with "the last five and a half years of Allirea's life." So...Allirea had been w/ the Volturi for five and a half years the last time Addy read Aro, which was...May 26 (ch 21 & 30). So Aro almost certainly has memories of werewolves, thus Adddy did, thus Elspeth does.
Did I miss anything?
Here are the broad strokes. (Let me know if you want the dates of other events.)
January 17, 2005: Luminosity opens.
October 2005: Assorted hell breaks loose (partial list in order: Irina finds out who killed Laurent and tips off the Volturi; the Volturi descend upon the wolves; Jacob summons Bella; the Volturi send Demetri looking for Nahuel's sisters; he finds them and helps himself to Allirea).
November 4, 2005: With Allirea in tow, the Volturi nab Alice.
April 4, 2006: Bella encounters Jasper.
May 10, 2006: Bella finds Elspeth.
May 20, 2011: Radiance opens.
May 26, 2011: Last date of Addy touching Aro. Aro was reasonably up-to-date (within a month or two) on the Volturi and Volturi guard at this time, including Allirea. He doesn't keep quite so up-to-date, temporally speaking, on the wolves, but as of this date he has read all the then-in-village alphas and imprints (as they came in, to determine how to cover up their disappearance to the wider world), and about half of the village wolves who were activated when first brought in.
May 27, 2011: Elspeth and Jacob's pack are captured in New York.
May 28, 2011: Elspeth and Allirea jailbreak.
May 30, 2011: Elspeth & co. arrive in Denali. IT'S A TRAP! Some hours afterward, Bella shows up, encounters Allirea and Eleazar, and gets the former out of there.
June 8, 2011: Elspeth is first recruited as assistant brainwasher.
July 1, 2011: The events of "Weaver" take place.
July 3, 2011: Demetri starts looking for Allirea.
July 4, 2011 (no pun intended): Addy is sentenced to death and memory-blasts the Volturi compound and escapes with Elspeth and Jacob.
July 8, 2011: Elspeth's current party arrives in Alaska.
Thank you, this is very helpful. (edit: Erm, out of curiosity, when was Addy picked up by the Volturi? Please and thanks.)
So Elspeth certainly has several sets of memories from werewolves, on top of the half-vamp memories she has from Allirea and herself, at least. It's possible for the theory to be tested in-universe, then, dependent on getting Alice back on their side.
That's a shame, because it's fairly hilarious.
It's definitely a risk, but it's also a huge power boost for them. Keeping them in the base seems logical to me (they should be under the heaviest possible guard and the closest possible supervision).
Really enjoyed the cliffhanger ending to this chapter.
There's no reason for them to reassemble all of the witches at the same time. It would still be stupid even if the room was full of guards. Having only a single point of failure preventing 16 powerful enemies from waking up in a room with only 2 defenders, plus any invisible enemies that might have been brought in, is the Biggest Ball of Idiot in Minnesota.
They knew Allirea hated Demitri, could turn invisible and could wake the witches just by touching Del. Yes, that would let Del get a sneak attack, but that would only last until she touched one of the other witches, or one of them touched her. Allirea only needed Elspeth because she couldn't rely on Chelsied vampires to cooperate with her plan to kill Demetri.
There actually is a reason, although it's one of convenience more than absolute necessity. To keep vampires alive while normally maintaining them in fragments, they need to be fed pretty often, and on a tight schedule if they want any safety margin. They can't just be kept in small immobile chunks indefinitely. It's quite a production to handle the healing-and-feeding phase (Alec or Alec!Adelaide needs to be available, you need to fill up whoever feeds them so their food doesn't get stolen by inadequately fed guards, you need to have extra food on hand for the witches themselves, etc.). Heidi has to make a bunch of trips for extra food. She has to range farther than usual to get it so there won't be too many concentrated disappearances all at once in the near environs of Volterra. This all takes a while. Someone else could take on some of the hunting duties, but except for Heidi!Adelaide, nobody is quite as well-equipped to unobtrusively bring in an entire delicious tour group all at the same time, and Adelaide usually has other people to copy and other tasks to accomplish. Every extra guard they put in the room is somebody they have to saturate with even more blood so they can handle being there.
The best candidate for the idiot ball action here is that they didn't time the capturing of Jacob's pack for when the witches had already just been fed and were in harmless bits and pieces.
If you amputate all the limbs, is that a problem for continued survival (assuming potential preservation of limbs is not relevant for Voltury)? Why do you need to attach limbs when feeding? Why must they be kept unconscious, if without limbs they can just be fixed in place, with no way of escaping? This won't necessarily be enough for the few abilities that could allow escape or sabotage even without moving, but that doesn't apply to, say, Edward, and without limbs the situation is strictly better in any case, while removing the limbs supposedly costs nothing.
They could move a little even without their limbs. If kept conscious and intact, they could talk to each other and coordinate, re-forming any relationships sufficient to escape with the creative use of their powers even over Chelsea's attempts to sever them. Edward in particular wouldn't be much of a danger this way, obviously, but they're adopting a consistent strategy for the entire group.
Now you've gone and put all sorts of images of comical vampires into my mind.
Look, you stupid bastard, you've got no arms left.
Just a flesh wound.
What are you going to do, bleed on me?
I'm invincible!
Come back here and take what's coming to you. I'll bite your legs off!
What about some sort of iron maiden approach: a steel block with the vampire contained inside, one hole to their mouth to feed them, one hole near the leg or back or something so that Del could reach through and copy their power?
This gives the Volturi the advantage of portability: it wouldn't be easy to lug a hundred tons of steel around, but forklifts could allow relocation and such, or the transport of several vampires that Del needs to swap between on-site.
If there's a way of designing a cell so that a vampire can't use their teeth on it (as Elspeth appeared to have encountered) it should be doubly possible when the head is restrained.
You get to feed the captives less often, there's no need for special precautions around them, a prison-break from outside is definitely going to fail unless they bring serious cutting machinery (blowtorches, obviously, are right out).
It's also much, much crueler.
A vampire could just dig out of Elspeth's cell. Elspeth is not a vampire, and cannot do that. The cell is specifically for half-vampires.
...Like a vampire?
Or a saw fashioned from the harvested teeth of disposable newborns! Actually biting through a few tons of steel myself seems rather undignified. :)
Like a vampire without his teeth, jaw, hands or feet?
Constraining vampires is basically a trivial task given time to prepare. Their magic just isn't all that impressive compared to engineering. The confining-is-implausible rule is going to be one that is best supported by narrative decree (or idiot balls) than any real coherence with the physics.
The "serious cutting machinery" phrase was in a sentence about a prison break from outside.
That it's not in itself a complete solution, is not an argument about the security value of this precaution. They can't escape on their own if their limbs are destroyed or (say) stored on another continent.
What of it, they should be kept in cells in any case.
Or kept in solitary cells.
"Consistency" (simplicity, rather) is a poor argument for picking a bad strategy, making a possible disaster worse. If only 5 extra-witchy vampires escape, it's better than if all 16 vampires escape. It also expends more resources of maintenance. As you wrote:
Couldn't they just get one of the imprints to do it?
Their hold on the residents of the wolf village is partially dependent on an "out of sight, out of mind" approach to their knowledge of the vampires' eating habits.
They don't usually know this. She's usually too inconsequential for them to remember.
Ignoring a witch who makes multiple escape attempts, can make herself and others unnoticeable and is invisible to Alice does not strike me as an argument against the presence of an idiot ball.
I have a tendency to only speak up when I have something to complain about, so just to be clear, I do like this story. It seems perfectly believable that the Volteri set up this system hundreds of years ago when they only had one or two uncooperative witches, then never bothered to reevaluate it as the operation scaled up. From a story-telling perspective, neither Bella nor Elspeth are HJPEV, so it would be inappropriate to make Aro into Quirrelmort unless you really hate Bella and want her to lose.
On the other hand, believable idiocy is still idiocy. If Aro WAS Quirrelmort, he would have experimentally determined how much of a vampire could be destroyed without killing it and whether they could be crippled by cutting open their joints and pouring venom into the wound. If the answers turned out to be "none" and "no," he could still have at least one other vampire in the room to attach the head of a witch immediately before feeding it and decapitate it immediately after it finishes.
They would be idiots if they willfully ignored her. They aren't. Her power is to be ignored. Occasions when she chooses not to be ignored are rare, and they can't get rid of her without ruining the effectiveness of an important witch of theirs. (Do they wish they'd kept James, now, so they could kill Allirea and Demetri and replace the latter with a less effective tracker with a more convenient (dead) mate? Yes, yes they do, but they didn't.)
Adelaide did not work for the Volturi hundreds of years ago, and so they had no reason to keep witches in the basement in bits.
Bella knew about Allirea's power and apparently remembered long enough to tell Elspeth about it. I thought the Volteri would remember things that Demetri told them about his mate, even if they couldn't notice her.
Keyword being Bella. She's badass like that. :)
Demetri is also immune to Allirea's power. Due to the magic bond he never sees her as unimportant.
OK, I obviously have not been doing a good job of thinking through the examples I'm using.
I'll concede this point.