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siduri comments on Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) Part 2 Discussion Thread - Less Wrong
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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.
Ahh, thankyou. In that case the question of whether comrades could be easily liberated from prisons is basically too trivial to even contemplate. Even without their physical capabilities the intellectual ability of vampires makes such things simple. With absurdly fast processing speed and a flawless memory a would be liberator could walk in with overwhelming and specialised technology.
This leads my speculation to a barely related tangent: If a vampire has something important that they want to achieve and is rational then timeframes of beyond a couple of years would be out of the question. They would obviously dedicate a small amount of time to a quick read of wikipedia and the references provided for any topics that seem important. A coven made up of individuals of slightly above average intelligence (any of the big players) that had something to protect would create an FAI<coven> in short order.
That isn't an idiot ball that an author could be expected to avoid. The only options would be to throw in extreme time constraints or artificially handicap vampire's learning ability in some areas to below human level in a way that isn't apparent in either canon or Twilight.
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.