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Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) Part 2 Discussion Thread
This is Part 2 of the discussion of Alicorn's Twilight fanfic Luminosity.
LATE BREAKING EDIT: Part 3 exists now, so new comment threads should be started there rather than here.
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.
Here is Part 1 of the discussion. 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.
The fic is really really good but there is a twist part way through that makes the fic even more worth reading than it already was, but that makes it hard to talk about because to even ask if someone is twist-aware with any specific hints is difficult. The twist is in the latter half of the story. If you are certainly not post-twist and want to save the surprise, then you should stop reading here and fall back to Part 1 discussion or to the fic itself.
If you think you're pretty sure you are post-twist and are safe to read the rest of this, try reading this rot13'ed hint and see if what you've read matches this high level description of the twist...
Rqjneq unf qvfpbirerq gur frperg gung Vfnoryyn jnf xrrcvat sebz uvz "sbe uvf bja tbbq" bhg bs srne bs Neb ernqvat Rqjneq'f zvaq. Va gur nsgrezngu, fbzrguvat unf punatrq nobhg gurve eryngvbafuvc gung znl unir pnhfrq lbh gb pel sbe n juvyr, naq juvpu znlor urycf gb rzbgvbanyyl qevir ubzr gur pbzovarq zrffntr bs YJ'f negvpyrf nobhg "fbzrguvat gb cebgrpg" naq "ernfba nf n zrzrgvp vzzhar qvfbeqre" naq gur jnl gurl pna fvzhygnarbhfyl nccyl gb crbcyr jub unir abguvat zber va gur jbeyq guna fbzr fvatyr crefba jub gurl ybir.
If the answer to the hint is obvious, then just to be sure that there is not a double illusion of transparency at work, here is the cutoff point spelled out explicitly:
Gur phgbss cbvag sbe cbfgvat urer vf gung lbh unir ernq hc gb puncgre svsgl svir (va gur snasvpgvba irefvba) be puncgre gjragl rvtug ba Nyvpbea'f jrofvgr jurer Rqjneq jnf cebonoyl vapvarengrq, Vfnoryyn fheivirf na nggrzcgrq vapvarengvba, naq fur unf gb ortha gb jbex bhg jung gb qb jvgu gur jerpxntr bs gur erfg bs ure "rgreany" yvsr.
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Comments (420)
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/3jt/luminosity_twilight_fanfic_discussion_thread_3/
Please use this thread going forward. (I think continuing old discussions here is fine, though.)
I don't have a child and I'm only really close with one family member, but if I had the opportunity to destroy an organization that kills hundreds of thousand of people and probably will kill a whole lot more if left unchecked, then I'd probably do my best no matter how many family members I lose, or I myself die. While fighting them I'd also be doing my best to make sure the system that will replace them will help people instead of kill them.
It's kind of like how I see today's society. We're almost all taught that success is to earn money; and that money is created out of nothing and has a value controlled by the corporations who have the most of it. Because they have so much money, they can control much of the world. Many politicians they have close ties to are funded and become a congressman or even President. They control the law and they control the industry.
They don't like people who spread this knowledge, but they're not much of a threat yet as the great majority do as they're taught and condemn them as crazy conspiracy theorists without getting any information on the topic or giving it a single thought. More of a threat are political leaders who want what is best for their people and start using the country's resources for them. They get bribed, threatened and scandalized or killed--in that order--if they're unwilling to be swayed.
Nowadays they just don't come to power. In countries where such leaders are elected by other politicians they are lumped together with the crazy conspiracy theorists. In countries where the people elect them, we get people like Aung San Suu Kyi who are isolated and ignored for 20 years while the world twirls its thumbs like they can't do anything.
I'd risk my life to change this system, which is what I believe people will eventually have to do if there is to be any change. It's the reason we have competition over resources we can make abundant with our technology; war, poverty, starvation etcetera are all results of the system, which thrives on scarcity, not abundance. That's why we use oil and diamonds for example, because they're scarce and therefore can be sold at a high price.
You know, this model of reality is really not true-- but before you cut me off as one of the great majority that does as it's taught, I'd like to point out that I disagree for reasons unlike those that you probably encounter most of the time. I don't think that reality is better than what you claim, and I'm not going to say that you're nuts. Unfortunately, I think that reality is worse than what you just said. Please take the time to read my post and hear me out, because I feel that this is important.
There is no conspiracy. There is no system, or at least not one that we can control. There is no one group that controls all world events. It's just people all the way down. And people are irrational, weak-minded, hypocritical, obsessed with status, and prone to making the same mistakes over and over again.
Conspiracy theories are actually optimistic, not pessimistic. If your model of the world were true, it would be easier to solve the world's problems than it actually is. All we would need to do is take out the guys at the top-- the corrupt corporate dictators who control the law, the industry, and the world economy-- and either tear down the system or take the helm and steer it towards good. In short, if we just eliminated or deposed those who act to enforce scarcity, a golden age of technological abundance would be ours to take.
But this will never happen. You mentioned a potential "opportunity to destroy an organization that kills hundreds of thousands of people," but no such opportunity will ever arise, because there is no such organization, or if there is it is not unique and a new one will rise in its place. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of people die every day, and not because the evil overlords demand that this must be so, but because mankind is far from the conditions of natural adaptation. We are not optimized to live in modern society-- indeed, many elements of modern society run counter to everything that our bodies and minds were designed for-- and the vast, vast majority of people aren't even aware of this. People trust their intuitions, rely on their instincts, cling to that which has been passed down from their ancestors-- and much of the information derived from these methods is wrong, and has been wrong for years and years, and leads only to ruin.
That being said, that doesn't mean that we have to stay that way. You've found your way to this site, which is the first step. Stay here, read the sequences, practice he art of human rationality as best you are able-- in time, you will be able to see that which most have missed. You will be able to correct their errors. Indeed, you will be able to guide others to the path, and help them become capable of correcting their own errors. After all, thousands of years of history show that, when left to our own devices, we merely repeat our same mistakes, but on grander scales-- it is only by raising the "sanity waterline" of mankind as a whole that we can hope to see people truly change.
It's a frightening world out there, and not one that we'll be able to redeem by one noble sacrifice. Indeed, the struggle to create a sane society will be one of the hardest if not the hardest thing that man has ever done. But I staunchly believe that we're up to the task. After all, I know of no other time in human history that a community like this has existed-- a community designed to advance the art of human rationality and conquer the petty insanities that have doomed so many over the years, and a community that is organized using modern methods and draws from the principles of science and rationality to target those insanities precisely. As a result, this community is uniquely poised to strike out against insanity, against war, against death itself, and yes-- against "the system." For every system is composed of people, and if the people that make up that system come to understand that there is a better way, it will prove unable to hold itself up.
Yes, we are living in interesting times here (as the old curse goes), and participating in an exciting and indeed critical task-- the most important task ever confronted by mankind. I hope that you'll join us and come to be a part of it.
Related short story.
I love it.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And also: yes.
I suspect this is why they are popular: a belief in a coherent enemy is emotionally satisfying compared to a belief in a pervasive flaw.
Well, the pervasive flaws in how our societies work creates competition, which will inevitably make people conspire against each other. Conspiracy theories are optimistic in that they often single out a single organization as the bad guys, when really what is needed to improve our lives and ensure our race survives as long as possible is drastic universal change in human culture.
This comment appeals to my aesthetics in a way I did not previously predict I could be appealed to. I think it should be tidied up a bit to make more sense out of context, and recorded as a speech in ringing tones and put on Youtube.
I'm aware of what you say. I'm sorry if I didn't convey that in my previous comment. We won't solve the problem by simply removing those who are most greedy (they are there, of course, and always have been) from their positions of power, because we too, are greedy. Like you say, humanity has to become more aware and rational, and learn to cooperate, because we all live in symbiosis with each other and everything else in the universe(s). There are still those with a lot of power who for some reason fight against this for monetary gain though. But in the end, they rely on other people to keep their system(s) in place. If people start being rational and think about what they're being told to do, and how society functions, then they'll soon find themselves with much less power, no matter how much money they have.
I will certainly study human rationality, but I will also study what technology can do for our future, in projects like 'The Venus Project'. If I find these things promising and useful, I'll spread the knowledge of them to the best of my ability.
Chapter 23: "lee...ders of the supernatural world" Ha! Yeah, I'm starting to like Jake really a lot.
Aro probably has more reasons to fear what Addy could do with her knowledge of his past actions and future plans than just his killing Didyme. I hope they find Bella soon. It seems like she would be essential in physically harming Renata, unless someone can injure her from outside her shield's effect range.
Airstrikes, napalm carpet bombing and nukes. Vampires need to get out of prehistory and cowboy up.
...do vampire teeth grow back? If so, how difficult would it be to make a sabot to fire one out of a gun?
(If heat would degrade the venom, substitute an air cannon, of course. Or use the tooth as an arrowhead, for that matter.)
Even regular vampires can catch arrows in midflight. At least they can if they are protagonists or anything from Giant Mook up. The Twilight kind should have no problem; even if they are facing the other direction they should hear it coming in time. I'm not sure how much better it would work in a gun - that's where the physics gets a bit arbitrary for the sake of narrative appeal.
No.
How about fingernails (or fingertips). That would seem to be a prudent method of disarming prisoners or the guests that are security risks without, well, actually disarming them.
Does this kind of vampire require their fangs to drink? Some need to use their fangs as straws to feed, making defanging a particularly brutal form of punishment (admittedly most such varieties can also grow fangs back after a month or two of being delirious with thirst). Most others can just tear an artery, slurp or even just lap it up. I'm guessing the twilight vamps fit into this category.
Twilight vampire fangs are not straws, so yeah, they can feed without their teeth.
Chapter 22.
Addy has run off without consultation after taking Siobhan's power. That could be bad. I'm having visions of a supervillain Addy running around.
Siobhan has asked the crucial question. They now have a really dandy weapon against the Volturi, can they inject it into the collective knowledge at the right time. This, of course, assumes that no Volturi come across the knowledge beforehand, in which case the effect is not likely to be as drastic, but still interesting.
Did Marcus himself receive the memory dump? If so, I recall reading that he spent most of his time brooding, presumably over Didyme. Would this cause him to immediately look for all the information available about Didyme in the memory dump? If so, he's already found it and gone ape, off-screen. Which would be kind of disappointing, unless we get a meanwhile later on.
Chapter 22 -- Addy, Addy, Addy. What's she playing at? I suppose it's not completely impossible that she was somehow pulling off an extremely subtle bluff when she said (while she had Elspeth's power) "ask me whatever you like about my current loyalties or future intentions and you'll have answers that I think will be satisfactory," but I think it a lot more likely that she simply changed her mind as soon as she got herself Siobhan's "I WIN" power. She saw a better path toward her goals, whatever those are.
If I were her--with the goal of "being left alone to conduct my research"--I suppose I would want to lay low during the Cullen/Volturi conflict, and strike up friendly (or at least neutral) relations with the victors afterwards. Elspeth's group will be pretty lucky if that's all Addy's planning.
(nods) If I were part of a group that Addy immediately fled the instant that she gained supertactical ability, I would take that as evidence that things are going to get very bad, very fast and we should probably start making plans to flee, ourselves.
Bear in mind that Addy has Siobhan's power, but so does Siobhan.
(nods) True.
Though Siobhan's behavior here has convinced me that her ability is deductive rather than precognitive in nature -- or, at least, that it depends on knowledge of salient facts about a situation. And it's likely that Addy knows salient things about the Volturi that Siobhan doesn't, and also likely that Siobhan knows salient things about her group that Addy doesn't, so it's not too surprising that they disagree about the next move.
Under those circumstances, having step one be "find out everything salient that Addy knows," which seems to be what Siobhan is doing, makes a lot of sense.
To say this differently: Addy and Siobhan are demonstrating an unusually good approximation to a corollary to Aumann's agreement theorem: two perfectly rational actors with a persistent disagreement must have saliently different priors. (Their shared power being as close an approximation to a perfect rationalist as one is likely to find.)
It would be interesting to see that pursued explicitly. That is, given that Siobhan's talent gives a different answer when applied to her priors than it does when applied to Addy's, one could infer things about Addy's salient knowledge based on the differences between those answers, in much the same way that Elspeth infers facts about people from the way she wants to talk to them.
And given that Elspeth has a lot of Addy's knowledge (though doesn't necessarily access it the same way Addy does), Siobhan working out in this way the classes of things-Addy-knows that are most relevant to the situation can prompt Elspeth to remember the specific things-Addy-knows in those classes, allowing Siobhan to model Addy's priors more closely. (And therefore more narrowly identify the remaining salient differences: lather, rinse, repeat.)
Neat!
The fact that Siobhan and Addy aren't doing the same thing reflects more the fact that they have very different goals. Addy, for instance, has no interest in controlling Ireland, and Siobhan doesn't particularly care if a steady stream of interesting witches enter her life and let her play with their powers.
(nods) Makes sense.
I'm not actually clear on whether Siobhan has committed to help, or is just exploring possibilities. I think this is a case where, not having read the canon, I don't understand Siobhan's motivations as well as somebody who was more familiar with the source material might.
Siobhan's motivations are not explored in any depth in canon. The entire Irish coven are basically extras, although it's technically possible to credit the happy ending of Breaking Dawn entirely to Siobhan if one wants to read it that way.
Spoilers up to Chapter 21
In Chapter 18, Addy sends Elspeth to get magically tortured by Jane, on the theory that Elspeth will be able to send that memory to people as a weapon. It worked, albeit with limited potency. In Chapter 21, when this comes up, Jake, Ilario, and Maggie all agree that this was a particularly evil act.
I'd just like to point out that the morality of this decision is actually rather complicated, and that different ethical frameworks give different answers about whether it's okay or not. While being tortured was certainly bad, Elspeth did get a minor power in return. This much was foreseeable and, in fact, foreseen. Now, it is possible that at some point in the future, having this power will allow her to survive a situation she otherwise couldn't, or save someone she otherwise couldn't. This, too, is foreseeable, but uncertain. There is overlap with the deluge-of-memory power, which Elspeth acquired later, but not so much overlap that it couldn't still be useful; and acquiring the deluge-of-memory power was not necessarily foreseeable.
If having the Jane-lite power does in fact save Elspeth's life, then Addy's decision will reduce to having forced Elspeth to trade a few seconds of torture for survival later. This is a scaled-down version of the decision humans make when deciding whether to turn into vampires - a smaller amount of pain for a smaller increase in power and a smaller probability of it making the difference between life and death. Note that a supermajority of the humans presented with the option to turn have taken it (though it hasn't been unanimous).
According to a utilitarian framework, whether it was right to send Elspeth to be tortured depends on Addy's estimate of the probability that the Jane-lite power proves useful, and the relative values of survival and avoiding torture. To a utilitarian, Addy's motive (increasing her own power and maintaining social dominance over Elspeth) is irrelevant.
But according to a deontological moral framework, that doesn't matter because Addy, being neither Elspeth nor Elspeth's legal guardian, didn't have the authority to make that decision. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any person who actually would have that authority - Elspeth's a minor, Jake's decision-making is tainted by magic, Bella is unreachable, and the decision couldn't be put off for long enough to resolve any of these. So a slightly different deontological framework - one that required at least one person with the authority to trade torture for power to exist, and excluded Elspeth from that role - would make an exception.
Finally, when considering the virtue-ethics question of how virtuous Addy is, all that is screened off by the fact that she's a serial killer who eats humans.
But at some point, I think, we ought to have a character consider the question and acknowledge the ambiguity.
Addy did not bother to make that estimate. To that extent, her motive may be relevant, mayn't it?
An approximation of that estimate is encoded in the belief that having more power is better than having less (and in particular, the degree to which that is so). Not necessarily a good estimate, but at least an estimate. And besides, Addy's motive is only relevant to the question of whether she's good or evil (already answered by the fact that she eats people), not to the question of whether her decision was right or wrong.
Now you've confused me.
If you mean "the question of whether her decision was right or wrong" independent of Addy's mental state, then why do you say it depends on "Addy's estimate of the probability that the Jane-lite power proves useful" rather than depending on the usefulness of the Jane-lite power?
It seems odd to take Addy's mental state into account with one hand and ignore it with the other.
But the characters in the story aren't debating whether her decision was or was not possible to justify under a utilitarian framework. They're reacting to the (new-to-them) knowledge that she's evil, and they get that by observing the carelessness with which she coerces a child into experiencing torture.
You might think that they should have already known that Addy's evil, but of course Jake has previously been under magical influence leading him to like and make excuses for the Volturi (including Addy), and Maggie is probably not inclined to write a vampire off as evil "just" because they murder people, since she spent a great deal of time doing exactly that herself.
Wow. Arbitrary numbers of sub-agents.
I think this officially qualifies as the most awesome superpower ever.
My commendations, by the way, for updating even on Christmas Eve.
So next chapter we're on the hunt for Siobhan. I hope she's not a witch, but rather very good at planning. Or if she does have a gift, it's sensible and not all too powerful. I wonder what Bella is doing. Maybe she's doing some planning of her own.
Well she has the potential to be vastly overpowered.
Sorry, I'm sticking to canon, and canon has an asterisk next to her name in the character list at the end of Breaking Dawn.
It's a universe with at least one full-fledged precognitive, and one in which two witches can share the same basic talent but have different suites of related "helper" abilities that control their expression (e.g., Aro's ability to file and compress memories). It ought not be surprising to find a witch with a precognitive talent expressed as a knack for picking the right plan.
I'm fond of that notion for the same reasons that I enjoy Elspeth's ability to learn about a target by analyzing the things she is inclined to say to that target... it allows for some entertaining thought experiments.If Siobhan is wearing a piece of cheese on her head, then it's likely that Siobhan wearing cheese on her head is the thing to do: what does that imply about the situation? I'm reminded of the princess in Her Majesty's Wizard.
All that said, if that is the deal with Siobhan, and she hasn't long since chosen to go to ground somewhere where our heroes won't find her, that implies certain things about the likely future that ought to cheer our heroes up. Belief in precognition is one heck of a morale boost, under the right circumstances.
I'm reminded of a novel I read in which at one point the protagonist — having the ability to see the future as it could happen — manages to extract information from people by just "counterfactually" asking them questions and seeing what their responses would be. Prescience let them interrogate random people without even moving.
That sort of precognition really does have the potential to be ridiculously overpowered. As its fine-controllability increases it becomes like having a bayesian superintelligence in your head, except it's not just superintelligent, it's (close enough to) omniscient as well. You could become one hell of an optimization process.
I vaguely recall something along those lines in one of Peter Hamilton's Greg Mandel novels... Quantum Murder, I think... the precognitive reports to her telepath partner that in none of the futures where he read the minds of anyone in that building does it turn out that they lied about what happened, and they go on to the next thing without ever entering the building.
I've had an idle desire for a long time to write a story with a precog where it turns out that in the most likely future she gets whammied by an illusionist following a detailed script, such that all of her long-range precognitive visions have been scripted by the enemy all along.
"Hell of a planner" plus a throwaway memory of hers suggested Alice to me; it isn't likely but the payoff for betting on Alice is surely more than 4:1?
Alice has been Chelseaed and lives in Volterra now. Also, she is very ill-equipped for making plans that involve Elspeth and Jacob.
Yay, new chapter!
Yay, Gianna and Maggie have a baby! It's kind of funny how cute those two are together, given that Maggie started off fairly horrifying. "Converting" Maggie might be Bella's greatest success (of course, she was helped a lot by the mate bond with Gianna).
I'm having to remind myself that Addy is still just as creepy and evil as she was when she was sending Elspeth to report for torture. Having her on "our" side is admittedly really useful.
Thinking about this more, though, I wonder if and when Elspeth is going to share with Jake the truth about her sessions with Addy. There's no longer a compelling need to keep that secret, and despite the work that Chelsea may have put in getting Jake to feel friendly towards Addy, I imagine his reaction to learning exactly what Elspeth was hiding all that time would be...poor.
I'm also a little confused about the pack dynamics. I understand that Elspeth is Jake's top priority, but shouldn't he be concerned about his pack too? It seems like now that he's out of the car he might want to "check in" with them.
I really enjoyed watching that conversation play out in Chapter 21 -- and my respect for Jake has notched up. I think it's impressive that he was able to control his wolfy protective instincts in order to keep a valuable (if evil) ally. He seems very sensible, actually (more so than Edward!). Elspeth is lucky to have him on her side--even though I also empathize with her (pre-Chelsea) assessment of the bond as a burden.
I also thought the line "I really don't think this is the time," Addy said coolly, eyeing the door on her side was very funny.
Within a pack, telepathy is involuntary. It is currently inconvenient for the Volturi to find Jacob, Elspeth, and Addy (since Demetri is away tracking down Allirea and has his phone off, and Alice can't see them). If Jake phases, and accidentally thinks of the fact that he's in Wexford, Ireland, and he still has packmates who haven't already been moved to Rachel or Becky's packs, then the Volturi will get a report on the group's location.
Aha--gotcha!
So if I've understood correctly, a large chunk of Volturi just received an involuntary crash course in the Elspeth Method of resisting social manipulation through radical honesty, along with whatever the information was that Aro wanted not to be shared.
Meanwhile, the Volturi just turned a werewolf pack leader into an enemy.
And Aro is out of town.
This has the potential to get messy.
Also several million years' worth of red herrings, mind.
If they are curious about what Addy was thinking immediately before she escaped, they can locate those memories and learn that there is a secret, which Addy has consciously noticed in the time since she first absorbed Aro's power, which narrows down the search a lot.
Indeed. Though I would expect memories that connect to things the recipient already has experience with to be more readily accessible than memories that don't... though that still implies herring in ton lots. (Ew.)
Also, being introduced to a technique does not entail using it, especially when one's social/emotional habits suggest otherwise. (More's the pity, perhaps.) Most, quite possibly all, of the recipients will treat it as a potentially useful technique for evaluating their own biases, should they ever actually decide to do the hard and uncomfortable work of doing that, which they likely won't.
Which means it's entirely plausible that when the dust settles, everyone's allegiances will be precisely what they were before (though the fact that Aro didn't want the information disseminated suggests that this isn't guaranteed).
Still and all, though, the period while the dust remains suspended, when loyalties are suddenly unreliable, should be... interesting. Though we may not get to actually read about it, as our viewpoint characters are now elsewhere.
I'm not sure if you've read Twilight Canon TheOtherDave, but Aro did kill his sister and Marcus' mate Didyme to prevent Marcus from leaving the coven, which was what Didyme had been wanting to do. I seem to remember this being said in Luminosity or Radiance, too, but maybe my memory errs.
In any case, Marcus is certain to go apeshit if he learns that particular piece of information. I doubt many are loyal to the catatonic man though, especially if Chelsea has been preventively cutting all his relationships - with the exception Aro's, Caius' and hers -, in case he should ever learn the truth and rebel. She still loses her ability to see what she's doing with her ability though, and that may over time damage relations with all the captives who aren't naturally loyal to them.
I've hinted but not confirmed. (But it shouldn't affect your enjoyment of the story too much if you have this knowledge via canon, I hope.)
Not at all! The thing I enjoy most with suspense stories is trying to figure out what's going to happen next; especially when they aren't finished and regularly update, like yours. If I didn't know this from canon, then I wouldn't have anything to speculate on. This goes for all stories that at all derive from canon in some form. It's also fun to see what characteristics authors keep or change, in most characters.
I of course really really like your Bella, even though, in my opinion, she had some trouble balancing her very dangerous ambitions with her sugary-sweet family life, inevitably ending in disaster for both. Although, with the way things were going for the Volturi, it wouldn't have been long until they swooped in and destroyed that family life to put the family witches in their prison.
I'm very curious about the state of Aro's witchcraft after recent delves into Adelaide's memory, too. Did he know about the Quileute tribe before Irina went and told them, or did he have that information stored away but not processed yet? I'm guessing it's the latter, since he immediately acted when Irina requested their help. Can you provide some insight into that Alicorn, if not publicly then in a private message?
My guess is that he did know, but considering that the Cullen coven believed the gene to be dead (they did, right?), he thought it unimportant at the time. That all changed when Irina proved them very wrong, of course.
I think there's enough clues in the text that I can just say outright: yeah, Aro had werewolf-related information stored but not processed before the story began. Irina a) prompted him to process it and b) informed him that it was relevant in the present.
No. They believed there were no active werewolves (and they were right until Bella went in and shook hands with everybody), but had no reason to believe that the gene had died out.
I really enjoyed this chapter. Having an insight into Addy's mind was very welcome.
Will we be seeing more of it, or are we going back to our regularly scheduled Elspeth now that she is conscious? Though I guess Elspeth would also now have that insight into Addy, though it might take her a while to find/realise it... but so will much of the Volturi... interesting.
I have lots of opportunity to drop in other perspectives; this is just the first one that I've inserted "in sequence" (e.g. you get it at the point when it happened chronologically). I'm not yet sure whether it will serve my storytelling needs to do more chronological switches to Addy's perspective, but it's unlikely that you'll be without Addy's narration at all for the remaining story, even if she's always narrating from the past here on out.
Chapter 19.
Interesting.
Since it took Elspeth a day to recover, how long would it take the vampires of the guard? Half the time? Less? I've never seen a hard number for how much more mentally able a vampire is than a half-vampire.
If Addy can be convinced to join a full rebellion against the Volturi, she could be quite a powerful asset. For one thing, she can copy Chelsea and break the enforced bonds; that would certainly cause enough havoc for a while, especially if Chelsea herself can be incapacitated beforehand. For that matter, how is Chelsea at self-defense? Could Chelsea!Del affect her in the same way so as to force her to their side, without her counteracting it? Somehow I doubt it; I would be surprised if Chelsea wouldn't just undo what was done immediately.
There's no real range limit on the wolves' telepathy, right? Previously it was mentioned that a test was conducted from the reservation to somewhere unspecified in Canada without any degradation in quality; can we assume from this that Jake is still in contact with the pack? Does Chelsea work on intra-pack membership bonds (i.e. could she make Jake's pack no longer his?)
In terms of raw processing power, vampires are about twice as fast/capacious as half-vampires. There are a couple of not-quite-qualitative differences (e.g. native architecture to handle seeing ultraviolet) that give them an extra boost beyond that in this sort of thing.
Chelsea's not a primary combatant by any stretch of the imagination, but she is very old and a key member of an organization that some people really don't like. She is better than the average vampire at combat.
Right.
Jake, as an alpha, has full unrestricted telepathy with any member of his own pack while both he and said member are in wolf form. He can also talk (only voluntary messages, no accidental letting slip of other thoughts) to his sisters when he and either of them are in wolf form.
Pack membership isn't the same sort of thing that Chelsea does. She could make Jake's wolves more willing to voluntarily change packs, but not force it without their agreement.
The power can snip immediately, but takes time to artificially grow relationships. I guess this would mean that they would both snip each other's relationships immediately, and then try to grow the desired side's relationship - if they can affect themselves, they would remain relationshipless for as long as they were near each other (constantly snipping the artificial ones growing in them, constantly having the natural ones growing in them snipped). If they can't, it would be a race to grow the right relationships the fastest.
I find one practical way to win such races is to stab the opponent in the eye with a white hot poker. Is that an option here, given that they are apparently near each other?
Witchcraft powers that require both time and proximity to work seem to be vulnerable to the general witch defense strategy.
Interestingly, I would think not. Addy and Chelsea would not normally stab random vampires, so the moment they cut each others' relationships they would lose the option of stabbing each other. Either party would never let the other's animosity grow to the point where they consider violence.
Neither impulsive homicidal tendencies nor a threatened emotional bond is required to prompt a decisive witch slaying in this situation. A vampire wedrifid, for example, would slay the rival in less than the ghost of his lost heartbeat. If you know there is a witch that can eliminate emotional bonds within range and you currently do not have a particularly good reason to trust them then you kill them. You don't feel anything. Just slay because it is the smart thing to do.
It is not clear that either Addy or Chelsea are this practical or rational. This is just what they should do.
Why shouldn't you feel anything, or not be moved by undesirability of murder? (These are two separate concerns.)
Oh, you can if you want to. But you don't need to and certainly cannot rely on emotions to be protecting you from threats the way they usually do.
Don't misuse that 'murder' word. I wouldn't walk into another man's house carrying a gun and call it 'attempted murder' if he tried to take me out. Walking into range with values destroying capabilities without some sort of alliance or truce is a far more hostile act. Expect death.
Don't mind the words, we are discussing something more important than that. The consequence of a person becoming dead has the same moral value in each case, some situations might just have that on the preferable side of the calculation. That it's a correct decision doesn't diminish the moral value of the pattern.
(If the implicit inference you were seeing in the word "murder" is that it has a morally negative aspect, then I endorse this particular inference, being right doesn't make it better. If the inference is that one should be punished by society for this act, then it's not an inference I explicitly endorse in this context, and one that's not relevant to the discussed situation.)
If we are talking about the loss of having to kill the vampire witch rather than moral negative of murder then I can see your point. Vampire!Wedrifid would prefer to keep them alive. Unfortunately wedvamp does not yet have the power to protect his enemies from themselves as well as protect everything else he values from his enemies.
This is a matter of values and mathematics. Everything that wedvamp holds dear is at stake (so to speak) and in clear and present danger. His values are vulnerable to instant unwilling modification and the witch has signaled her hostile intent by walking within range without arrangements in place. This is not a time to play Ghandi. And I'm not sure even Ghandi would be willing to stand by as his mind was altered to make him unthinkingly loyal to a group of ruthlessly evil bloodsucking fiends.
No, this isn't a time to signal a naive morality to idealistic lesswrong members. It is a time to shut up, multiply and protect. This Wedrifid is a vampire, he has what it takes.
Since I'm not arguing about whether the decision is correct, rather that the disutility of having a person killed doesn't diminish from the decision to kill them being correct, it's confusing why the thrust of your replies is on correctness of the decision, dismemberment of arguments for its incorrectness, even the ones clearly not advanced by anyone, and glorification of the decision's correctness. This can't help but leak connotationally into the inference that the value of person's life is getting diminished in this context (and I do keep wondering whether you're evil!). The explicit disclaimer doesn't have much detail to resolve this ambiguity, it only states a sign:
The way this convention works would have you write it vampire!wedrifid. It's descriptor!character.
These are vampires we're talking about. Non-vegetarian ones.
Exactly. And as well as having different emotional responses to murder the line between self defense and murder is altered beyond recognition too. The interpersonal boundaries we have are adapted for human capabilities and to a significant extent by the power structures of our particular culture. Interpersonal boundaries in a culture where people can drastically mess with your mind based on proximity would be quite different.
They have all the usual emotions regarding other vampires, even if the balance is different. Besides, moral considerations can move you where emotions disagree, and it's "should" we are talking about, not "is". What should you do, not what you'll actually do. What should you feel, not what you'll actually feel. For example, non-vegetarian vampires very likely shouldn't kill people for food.
Both Addy and Chelsea have extremely good reasons not to kill witches; Addy can copy their power, and Chelsea can convince them to use their power for her own purposes. I suspect this would be enough to lock them in a stalemate. The battle between rebels and Volturi would look interesting - in the midst of wolves and vampires duking it out, you have two vampires who aren't on anyone's side, and who don't care to be on anyone's side.
Yes, the slaying should be limited to witches you are particularly vulnerable to. You can't get much more vulnerable than being exposed to people who can instantly make huge changes to your value system against your will.
Not if they are sane. You don't give people free reign to hack with your values.
Coup de tête? The magic takes control? Magic go FOOM?
Guys, it's totally Alec, how much more obvious can I make that without Elspeth finding time to call his name to mind immediately after being plunged into sensory deprivation?
Public spoilers! :O
I hope he's not there on behalf of Aro deeming Elspeth too dangerous. I have no idea why he'd do something like rebel though, but then we haven't exactly gotten any information on what goes on in the background. I guess it's also possible Addy developed the necessary heuristic to counteract Chelsea and spread it to Alec who for some reason doesn't want work for the Volturi and is for some reason now subduing Elspeth?
This is the most exciting we've had in a while. I just hope next chapter gives us at least a sliver of hope that things aren't going to continue to go so well for the Volturi.
Chapter 18.
Wait, what? Has she just been hit by Alec or Alec!Del? That's all I can think of. Why?
Mostly posting just because feedback is what motivates most fic writers to continue. I'm also eager to get the resolution to the cliffhanger (I had to go look up what Alec's power was, since I've never read the books--it does sound like that's what just happened to Elspeth).
I also wanted to praise a little snippet of text: "Jane's room was decorated mostly in warm colors. She had carpet that matched her eyes, a lot of knicknacks made of gold, a cherry wood wardrobe, and pale orange upholstery on her sofa set. This made her slight figure, dressed in the black cloak of the Volturi, stand out like a blot of ink against the bright background." That's lovely, and it's exactly the kind of sensory description that helps me, as a reader, feel more realistically grounded in Elspeth's experience.
I would be delighted if we got a sentence or two about how things look every time Elspeth went into a room, new or not -- I don't remember at this point what the assembly hall is supposed to look like (I guess I'm picturing it sort of like a high school cafeteria) or how Jacob's room is set up (pictures on the wall? rugs? Do they keep it tidy or messy?). These rooms might have been described the first time they appeared, but after several chapters I need some reinforcement from the text to be able to picture them clearly.
Thank you!
I'd like to provide a data point in a different direction from siduri - I too liked that section, but I liked it because it turned a solely sensory description into character development as well. Jane's inkblot presence didn't serve to highlight the description of the room, the room's description highlighted Jane's character. Elspeth later wonders why Jane even exists; Jane is like an ink blot on Elspeth's view of the world. That is an excellent description that fleshes out Jane in my mind. I don't like descriptions of places and people for their own sake. Describing the assembly hall or Jacob's room is only desirable (for me as a reader of your work, not in general) if it tells us something important about Chelsea or Jacob, or pushes the plot forwards.
I put moderate probability that that's Adelaide sending her back her memories all at once, and that's how Elspeth perceives it.
Maybe she's just exhausted and that's how it manifests itself?
Perhaps she's receiving the memory of having been hit by Alec. That's the sort of thing Addie would probably test.
The only causes for her reaction at the end of chapter I can come up with are as follows.
1: She's been hit by Alec, and probably Addy has too.
2: Addy is sending all her memories to Elspeth, making her completely disoriented and "alone" with Addy's thoughts, that she interprets as her own.
3: Addy is sending her a memory of being hit by Alec, not all her memories.
1 probably means there's a rebellion for some reason. Or, more likely; Aro has found out about Addy's sessions with Elspeth and deemed them too dangerous to continue. Alec is there to separate them and perhaps kill Elspeth to eliminate the risk of her spreading a heuristic allowing people to neutralize the effects of Chelsea's witchcraft very effectively.
2 means we get to see whether Addy really is voluntarily working for the Volturi, or if she was tempted by their powers and later enslaved by Chelsea like everyone else. If she is, then she should have been able to use Magic to neutralize the effects like Elspeth does, but maybe she isn't able to make that decision herself but would turn sides if Elspeth sends her the same heuristic she would her friends.
3 probably means Addy is testing if a memory of Alec's power is sufficient enough to keep a person subdued. If it is, then she may decide Elspeth's witchcraft can't develop any further and finally deem her uninteresting and not useful.
I hope it's something close to my second guess, so Elspeth can finally get on with freeing people from this horrible situation. And later the Volturi can hopefully get what's been a long time coming. Especially Aro, Chelsea and Addy, if she's a voluntary participant.
That would be telling.
Is it just my imagination, or is the chapter for this Friday missing?
It is still Friday. I am not technically late yet. Be patient.
Edit: Updated. Still on schedule!
I particularly enjoyed this last chapter--Chelsea remains terrifying, and Addy is pretty scary too--and I'm now joining other readers in speculating about Addy's motives in all this. Maybe she (and Aro) have read enough of Chelsea's memories to know they should mistrust her, even as her power continues to work on them?
Chapter 17, I'm really liking it too.
When Elspeth was captured and basically "changed into a new character" with a few finger wiggles, I was horrified (and wondering what these stories had to do with rationality any more) but as "Magic" is fleshed out I'm seeing a lot of interesting resonance between Elspeth's power and social complexities that can come up for people who are compulsively honest in ways that might damage their relationships sometimes.
Chelsea works as a sort of a personification of a whole suite of cognitive biases documented in Influence. Reading with that as a subtext ramps up the scariness and interestingness in some ways, but it also almost gives me sympathy for Chelsea. Most of the biases in "Influence" are intelligible as honestly useful heuristics for organizing a small cohesive group that shares wisdom and resources.
What kind of healthy emotional life could Chelsea possibly have had, given the world her power puts literally "at her fingertips"? She doesn't just have the ability to manipulate, but to detect people's attitudes toward her in a way that is tied into her emotional reward centers. She's probably an emotional wirehead, with the parts of her brain that were intended for primate social bonding having been hijacked by a much simpler stimulus-reward behavior-loop instead, and then reinforced for two millennia while excluding other more complicated ways of getting positive emotional feedback that involve actually positive social coordination. Tragedy!
Also, opportunity: I think Elspeth may be the first person on the planet (other than Bella, but Bella has never been around to interact with Chelsea) who could possibly teach Chelsea what "those parts" of her brain are "actually for", and neither is likely to do that because Chelsea is working at cross-purposes to both of them.
These past few chapters have been excellent. Now I'm curious about how effective a weaponized version of Elspeth's power would be against Bella. Does it penetrate Bella's shield, or does Bella need to consciously allow it through?
Bella is not now and has never been immune to Elspeth's power in any form.
Is this because Elspeth and Bella have special relations, or is it just because Elspeth's power naturally trumps Bella's? For example, would Elspeth!Adelaide be effective against Bella?
My guess would be it's because Bella never thought her shield should block Elspeth's power. IIRC Jasper's power affected Bella, and then when she thought about how her power should interact with Jasper, it suddenly started working.
Answering this question would constitute a minor spoiler.
Assuming that the answer is the same as in Twilight Canon, here's why this works(if you have not read the books and do not want to spoil yourself, do not decipher, obviously):
Va Gjvyvtug Pnaba, Ryfcrgu(be engure, Erarfzrr be jungrire gur cbxrzba vf pnyyrq) cbffrff na 'vairefr' cbjre gb ure cneragf. Vr. juvyr Rqjneq pna ernq zvaqf, fur pna fraq gubhtugf. Naq juvyr Oryyn vf fuvryqrq, fur pna crargengr fuvryqf.
This is only speculation in canon. I may or may not have chosen that interpretation :)
Can Chelsea affect imaginary relationships? What I'm getting at is: could she snip the trust that Elspeth has for her internal personification of her magic?
In a sense. If, for example, you believed a chatbot to be a real person and felt a deep friendship for that chatbot, Chelsea could make said friendship evaporate; she works on one person at a time and doesn't need both targets there (which is why she can also work on relationships where only one party is alive).
No, this wouldn't work. First, Magic isn't a different person from Elspeth; Magic is a subagent. It would be ridiculously overpowered - even compared to Chelsea's existing powers - if relationships between subagents were vulnerable. That would make it possible for Chelsea to drive people insane by looking at them and wiggling her fingers. Second, Magic isn't just trusted because Elspeth considers her a friend or something. Magic is trusted because that's part of the magic, that when she says true things they are believed.
Mm. I think you may be overgeneralizing here.
Sure, having Chelsea be able to edit the relationships among subagents is essentially the ability to perform psychic surgery -- not just drive people insane (which is not an incredibly useful ability, all things considered, though it's handy from time to time), but more generally to edit their personalities.
Agreed that that would be overpowered, and that there's no reason to expect it to be true.
But Elspeth is a bit of a special case right now. That is, she not only has the usual relationship-among-subagents linkage with Magic, which is immune to tampering, but by virtue of visualizing Magic as a separate body with an autonomous personality she is also forming a social relationships with it analogous to the social attachments we form to other primates, in much the same way that it's easier to develop emotional bonds with someone on the Internet (or with a chatbot) if you interact with them in a VR simulation.
I would expect Chelsea to be able to edit away that aspect of their social interaction... that is, to revert Elspeth's state with respect to Magic to what it was when they were first introduced, with whatever sense of social bonding has evolved since then snipped away.
Of course, as you say, Elspeth would still trust Magic, just like she did when they first met, because that's Magic's nature.
Unrelatedly: is your offer to email people spoilers still open? If so, I'd love to know whether my theory here is at all consistent with where you're going. I of course won't divulge anything, etc.
The offer is open. The comment you link contains a lot of content; please PM me more specific questions.
Two Points: 1) Your fanfic made me read the original stuff. Interestingly, for me, somehow the differences felt larger than in Eliezers fanfic, although I do realise that your fic has fewer points of departure than Eliezers. Might be because I hadn't read books from the Potter series in quite som time. A question though: I'm not far into the series, but I thought that at first, you only wanted the protagonist, Bella, to act more rational. However, the original!Bella seems to share luminous!Bellas wish to become a vampire, and, while less organized, advances the same arguments as luminous!Bella. Yet, luminous!Bella manages to convice Edward whle original!Bella doesn't. I admit that I didn't read your work as attentively as I might have read a paperback, so I might have missed the reason for that. Could you perhaps point me to it?
2) What's the reason again for Chelsea not being the leader of the Volterra coven? Her power is terrifying, and seems to be really dangerous if applied intelligently. More so than Aro's.
1) Canon!Edward remains convinced until book 4 that turning Bella will constitute destroying her soul. Canon!Bella's attempts at addressing this are silly (arguing mostly from her belief that Edward must have a soul even though he's a vampire, on the grounds that he is wonderful and wonderful persons have souls). Luminous!Bella attacks this soul-related premise more directly, making the matter of turning a dichotomy between immortal life and Cessation Of Existence. And - while Edward might have otherwise changed his mind after agreeing - she makes the Volturi aware of her existence and interested in her progress significantly earlier than Canon!Bella did, meaning that it comes down to turning her or letting the Volturi punish her and the coven.
2) It's canon. I justify it by her simply not being interested in running the show; she just wants to be an indispensable member of the winning team.
My guess would be that Chelsea doesn't want to be quite so much a target at the top, preferring the role of a puppet master... (Well, at least in Luminosity, in canon it's probably just not well thought out ;] )
And here I was thinking that perchance Addy also wants immunity from Chelsea to be able to do some major restructuring, but seems unlikelier now - or at least, not any particularly good kind thereof ;] Brady, spooky.
Seems like it could help if Elspeth's ventures were to become rather ... uninteresting. Would be nice to know what's going on elsewhere, but having a static first person perspective does have some narrative limits. Anyway, hope the outside will touch on the inside at some point again.
I like that this story is based on rationality and strategy and not my-awesome-control-the-world-witchcraft-is-better-than-yours one uppance, but - after reading the horrible actions of the Volturi from a first person perspective - if, say, Bella suddenly developed the ability to erase all effects of witchcraft on the mind, past and present, in a very large EMP-.like attack - making possible the destruction of the Volturi by the overwhelming mass of unwilling manpower they've recruited - , my first reaction would be to cheer.
As it is, I find the likelihood of that or something similar happening very slim. I wouldn't like such an anticlimax after my first initial reaction to the just demise of the Volturi, either. The Volturi are however looking more and more insurmountable to me, both from outside attack and anything Elspeth can currently do; key word being currently, as her witchcraft may develop in a surprisingly useful way neither she or Adelaide anticipated; Adelaide did say it had much potential for further development, and may even trump Aro's success in that regard.
I'd like to see Bella again, but with all the witches recaptured (with the exception of the teleporter) and all of them except Edward working for the Volturi, I don't see what she can do with those remaining of the Cullen family and a few of their known acquaintances, if they are even allied to her still. Maybe she'll act out of desperation and somehow manage to drop a really big bomb on the Volturi complex, with the hope that it kills as many enemies as possible, while sparing her family and allies. ;)
If I were the Volturi, and had complete knowledge of everything the readers know (or even everything Adelaide knows) I would be very concerned about the fact that a supernaturally effective communicator who was also an Alpha's imprint was working on a way to subvert the influence of my primary mechanism for ensuring the loyalty of a mass of other witches and werewolves.
That is, I don't think it would be at all implausible for Elspeth to work out a heuristic for neutralizing Chelsea's ability -- not by supernaturally negating it, but by developing her self-awareness via the exercise of explicitly formalizing the interactions among her cognitive subagents; by prioritizing what she knows about her values over what she experiences about them (or, to use Alicorn's terminology: by choosing to endorse the parts of her psyche that align with her pre-Chelsea values and repudiate the parts that don't) and consequently behaving in ways consistent with what she believes to be most importantly true of her, rather than consistent with how she feels).
And if Elspeth does develop a heuristic for doing that, she can communicate that heuristic to others very effectively. That's what she does, after all: she is a supernaturally powerful outbound communicator.
And, well, if she communicates that heuristic to the newly Chelseaed witches effectively enough, then some of them may well manage to do the same thing. And if she does the same to Jake, he is pretty much immediately on her side, and presumably a sizable chunk of wolves go along with him (especially since the wolves' telepathic network will propagate her heuristic like a virus through Windows).
And the Volturi suddenly have a collection of powerful enemies right in their midst, and for every "turned" vampire there are another half dozen who haven't turned but they can't necessarily trust. Their power structure doesn't collapse, but it certainly gets wounded, which can easily give Elspeth, Jake, and whoever ends up turned a chance to get away.
And after that, well, it's basically a magical propaganda war.
Yes, this is probably (and hopefully) what will happen if there's to be an escape for Elspeth and potential vampires and wolves. I wonder how much Aro knows about Adelaide's interactions with Elspeth. Her judgement on the risk Elspeth poses may be clouded by her interest in developing the usefulness of a witch's power, but I doubt Aro has enough interest in that or enough tolerance for Adelaide to permit this huge risk. I think it's very unlikely that with all his wisdom and experience he wouldn't realize the risk, if he knew what Adelaide currently knows of Elspeth. If he did, he would probably order her and Jacob killed, immediately.
So I think it's safe to assume Adelaide hasn't shared her information on Elspeth with him since she learned of her ability to start behaving like she did before Chelsea affected her relationships, at will. If I remember correctly, we haven't learned much of Adelaide's life before she joined the Volturi, and so we can't know for sure how much of her behavior is caused by the effect Chelsea may have had on her. Perhaps she isn't loyal to the Volturi by her original values, and now that Chelsea may be concentrating more on Elspeth and the newly seeded witches, those are starting to come through, allowing her to refrain from reporting to Aro.
I imagine Aro would be worried enough to take action if he knew of Chelsea's continuously failed attempts to keep Elspeth's values of her relationships in check, too. Maybe she's too busy being afraid of what he may do if there's reason to believe her witchcraft isn't as infallible as previously believed, to consider whether Elspeth can pass the ability onto others or not. Just recently they learned of Bella, who she can't affect at all, and now Elspeth is, to Chelsea's knowledge, seemingly somehow able to restore much of her previous values, despite increased maintenance. She's probably scared out of wits of being deemed dispensable, irrational though it is, as neither Bella or Elspeth has any means to spread their immunities to others, yet.
If Elspeth is to do this, she will have to do it all very quickly at the right opportunity, and before Aro or anyone who would think the risk not worth anything she contributes gains the knowledge Adelaide and Chelsea posses. The Volturi have ways to detect what she is doing or about to do if she takes her time spreading her heuristic; Alice will for example likely see many vampires fleeing or rebelling - unless there are wolves or half-kinds nearby her or the subjects of her visions - when she makes the decision to spread it, or even as a result of her sessions with Adelaide, before she makes the final decision. Alice may however think about this before she informs Aro or anyone else in the Volturi, and decide to avoid doing that and instead flee together with Jasper when the others do, especially if she sees herself and Jasper flee in her initial visions.
Well, even if I'm right, it's not clear that Aro is likely to believe it. It is quite an inferential jump from "can talk to herself" to "can undo the effects of Chelsea's magic," after all, and we are not always aware of the implications of what we know.
Unrelatedly, but for example: it occurred to me the other day that if someone had told me a few months ago that we would soon be receiving the first confirmed signals from a technological artifact outside the solar system, I would not have believed them, despite that fact being trivially derivable as the highest-probability outcome of things I knew about.
Isn't that how the Volturi are winning? They are using strategy, of course, but the captive witch archive (probably their main tactical innovation) is only a good plan because of Adelaide. The loyalty of their army is only because of Chelsea.
It's true that without certain witches like Adelaide and especially Chelsea, the Volturi would have nowhere near the same amount of power and control they have now. Their witchcraft isn't so powerful that they got where they are simply because they exist though; they've been using them intelligently, and creating situations in which they can be used most effectively, by other means.
There hasn't yet been, in my opinion, any I-WIN witchcraft that enables a witch to fight with anyone and everyone without caution, or making them unable or unwilling to fight. They've all had flaws and counters, and the Volturi are winning because they've been doing a good job of covering those for a very long time. They've been simultaneously killing off opposition and potential threats - by destroying the people responsible for it, or capturing them and making use of their talents - and painting themselves as good, necessary vampires. All this make Adelaide and Chelsea's witchcraft more powerful, as both are more useful the more people the Volturi surround themselves with.
They seem to me to never be overly overconfident; they're always trying to be conscious of their own weaknesses and try to cover them as fast and effectively as possible, while also trying to be as informed of potential threats as possible, so they may use their weaknesses to eliminate the threat they pose as fast and effectively as possible. That's very rational behavior in a conflict, in my opinion. I also think it's a very healthy mindset to have in everyday life, because not all threats to your well-being and over all happiness with life has to be an armed person directly threatening yours or your beloveds' lives; often it's someone in a position of power who either intently or obliviously negatively affects you and others everyday lives through laws, economy, educational systems, judicial systems, health systems etcetera.
Sadly today's societies have little to no insight to this problem, beyond those who sit in these positions - who may be corrupt, or ignorant that their actions cause other people harm, and that they can stop this. I believe this is why we live in a world where most condemn those who are different, rather than use reason and both biased and non-biased information to find out if their appearance, what they do and think or where they live mean they are dangerous to ones health and enjoyment of life.
Too much power is put in those in a position to govern others, with no organized reasonable way to discern if what they're doing make people healthier and happier - which is, to me, the ideal everyone should strive for, along with making sure our race (and second to us; other races) continue to live and be as healthy and happy as possible; something I believe will be severely hindered if our people aren't consistently educated to apply reason and rationality beyond scientific topics, to social topics.
A few months ago there was a poll in one of Sweden's biggest online newspapers that asked the readers if they believed the Earth would ever cease to exist or be destroyed, and an astounding majority believed that it wouldn't. A similar result is achieved if one asks: do you believe humanity will ever be extinct? If we weren't all so ignorant, but rather rational people using reason to understand each other and the world, I believe all of humanity could live healthier and happier lives, and for many more generations to come than if we continued to be ignorant.
Beware of overgeneralizing from results like this one. I've seen a lot of similar surveys, and none of them have distinguished explicitly between "infinite" and "unbounded for practical purposes"; however, people outside of mathy fields tend to conflate the two. I'd read the Swedish result not as describing an actual infinity but as rejection of Singularitarianism and the more extreme Malthusian doomsday scenarios, which strikes me as a fairly reasonable standpoint.
This is true, and suggests to me we're using different standards. You're happy there's no one so strong they can win with their mind shut off; I'm unhappy that Bella entered a fight that she shouldn't be able to win. It's not so much a question of the Volturi out-strategizing Bella so much as it is her throwing herself against a wall. Yes, the Volturi needed some strategy to build the wall, but there's not much on Bella's part.
I really hope all these horrible Volturi characters suffer immensely soon. I've said it before but for every one of these chapters it deserves to be said again: most wicked Volturi EVER!
If anybody wants to contribute to my story a memory snippet (like the ones that appear in chapter 15 of Radiance), you are hereby invited to do so. Terms:
At this point, the memory snippet could be from a vampire or a human, a witch or a non-witch, but no half-vampires and no wolves, and no appropriating characters who have names already either in canon or Luminosity.
1-3 paragraphs, maybe stretch this if you include one-line paragraphs. Should be something at least as interesting and flavorful as the snippets in ch. 15 (this could be staring at the wall, as long as the thoughts are nifty in some way), but I'd like to minimize the re-use of ideas (so no more botanists or chessplayers or dancers, at least not if that's what the memory is about).
You don't have to match voice - you're not writing Elspeth, after all - but do match the story's tone; I don't want massive mood dissonance.
I reserve the right to edit your submission to smithereens. Or steal the idea but write my own snippet with it. Or not use it at all.
If I use your snippet (even if only for inspiration), you will be credited under the name of your choice, with an (optional) accompanying link of your choice, if I decide to use your snippet. This credit will be permanent, but plaintext (no clickable link) on the ff.net version of the story, with the URL spelled out. On my site, your input will be noted in the story text with a clickable link when the update first goes live, but I will remove it later so as not to interrupt archive-bingers; a collection of all the credits will exist persistently and will be linked to from the About page.
Best. Superpower. Ever.
We already knew her ability to "speak the truth" made her able to build unusually strong alliances. But this is even cooler.
Usually, when someone writes one of these "all is lost, but then by sheer force of awesomeness/will the hero overcomes it" it's pretty implausible, but I totally believe this one!
Also, it makes total sense that some of the Volturi's vampire witches would have a good amount of influence over what happens. Is this the tip of the iceberg; are we going to see more like Addy? It makes sense that if at any point Elspeth wants to change the Volturi status quo, she'd do it cooperatively, not all on her own like Bella.
I really want to see what Elspeth can get her power to do. (Is Magic, the pseudo-personal entity, actually running Elspeth's powers? Or is Magic just some kind of personification and Elspeth in control?)
I really like the way the last few chapters have been writen - it's as if they've been writen by a different person (a snipped person). It's amazing how chilling an idyllic account can be.
Yes. Like I said below it's been enough to make me wait for a while until there's enough updates that I can read straight through to happier times. If I don't then I feel queasy or enraged for quite a while after I've read the days chapter, and those are emotions I'd rather not have for very long. It's great writing Alicorn, but these recent chapters invoke these strong emotions in me and I'm currently unable to effectively mute them after I've read a chapter, so I won't be ranting here for a while. Maybe I'll save up enough content to have an extra huge rant, later on. ;)
I'm not sure I want to follow the story every update right now. I get easily upset when things are going downhill in a story, and so it's easier to read if I know things will eventually turn for the better or at least reach a conclusion. I think I'll wait a few updates and then read up on what's happened. This control the Volturi has is especially upsetting now when we have evidence of what our own governments have been doing, unbeknownst to us, and that not much is being done about it even though it's in the open now.
Chapter 13 is so, so, SO creepy. I feel like I need a shower now.
I don't know if it's because I've internalized the sunk costs fallacy or what, but I find mind control to be way less creepy after it's happened.
It's ongoing. That's why Chelsea is always at the mandatory assemblies.
I'm very pleased with myself for being able to so thoroughly creep out so many people by: describing how Elspeth, surrounded by her many perfectly innocent friends, spent her day chatting and reading and buying clothes and attending an eight-year-old's birthday party.
I wondered, at first, why Elspeth wasn't testing out her previous relationships by purposefully thinking of her mother or other people and noting her immediate reaction (which seems like the sort of thing she would do, in her right mind). Then I realized under mind control she would no longer think of any of those people as notable enough to wonder about her reaction to. Which is the really, really creepy part.
Yes it is, which is likely why Chelsea is at the mandatory assembly every single day. That way none of them will have time to feel any inclination to investigate their past life. Instead they'll be all too busy living their little village life and thinking they're the good cops when they go out on missions. I imagine they're filled a lot of bullshit about the people they hunt and the Volturi's reasons before and during missions, so it makes any potential windows of re-evaluation created by killing and kidnapping people on demand, be as minor as possible so Chelsea has time to do maintenance before they rebel.
Hopefully Elspeth's witchcraft make her the exception to this routine, which we had small evidence of in this chapter. Thinking of herself as free sounded false to Elspeth, because of it. When she has run out of trivial things to blame for the reaction, she'll probably use it to figure out why it makes such a statement feel false. I think this means that my previous hypothesis that she can use it not just to remember her love for Bella (who she thought of really hard in attempt to not forget when being Chelsea'd), but to re-evaluate everything she thought and did in her life, because her witchcraft will tell her what is true, and she won't doubt that.
This means that when she finds a window of opportunity to do this without alerting Chelsea, she could command Jacob to round up his pack and everyone else they can get their hands onto, and get the hell out of Dodge. I'm also quite sure she could tell the villagers what is true about them, the Volturi and the world and her experiences of it, to make it much easier and faster for them to fight against the values created in their minds by Chelsea. That may take more time than it would for Chelsea to sound the alarm though, and if that happened she wouldn't get another chance.
Hi, Alicorn, just wanted to say that the ideas from your fanfic and the related sequence have noticeably helped me in real life. I'm not fully implementing them or I wouldn't be spending my Saturday screwing around online, but I definitely feel empowered and optimistic, which is an unfamiliar situation. Applying these patterns of thinking at any time has proven to improve my life and my effectiveness. That is pretty cool for someone addicted to instant gratification.
Luminosity seems very related to mindfulness; it requires intentional control of one's attention in much the same way as meditation. I'm probably in better mental health than I usually am, since I can control my attention, but adding in your other strategies has allowed me to identify factors that help or inhibit my control.
So, uhh, thanks.
You're welcome!
Darn you, cliffhangers!
I want to know what effect Elspeth's other self will have on being Chelsea'd. If her other self can somehow propagate her love for her mother back to her, then that would take out a major chunk of the damage Chelsea can do to her. (Who else does Elspeth have a relationship with that Chelsea can nuke? Several people, Edward and the Denalis mostly; however, they aren't nearly as close to Elspeth. It would put even more of a crimp in her possible future relationship with Edward, though.)
On a side note, Chelsea's power is scary. Not just for its obvious nightmare-fuel, but for the cognitive implications. If it doesn't affect memory but still affects a person's evaluation of another's importance to them, then it must be either fundamentally changing their moral values such that even after reevaluating their memories, they do not feel that the other is important, or forcing the relationship-evaluating bit of their mind to evaluate to 'false' (or "Chelsea's chosen value", whatever) regardless of memory. But if it was the simple latter case, then a victim once they had left her immediate presence could undo most of the effect simply by reevaluating their memories and noting the things that make the other person important, which is evidently not the case. Thus, Chelsea is either fundamentally changing your sense of morality, or introducing irremovable inconsistencies into your relationship evaluation. Either way is awful.
Have you heard of Capgras syndrome? For people who have this (according to Wikipedia), "their conscious ability to recognize faces was intact, but they might have damage to the system that produces the automatic emotional arousal to familiar faces. This might lead to the experience of recognizing someone while feeling something was not "quite right" about them." Possibly similar?
But apparently Chelsea doesn't just change how you feel about someone, but how important you think they are?
Chelsea can destroy relationships. If Chelsea walks up to some person A and goes "snip snip" on A's relationship with some other person B, then A no longer emotionally distinguishes B from any demographically similar person that A has never met or seen who lives far away and isn't related to A's social network.
So, for example, no one who Chelsea has "snip snipped" with regards to Natalie considers Natalie more interesting or important than some random baby in sub-Saharan Africa who has died of iodine deficiency. Yes, it is mildly saddening to think of any dead baby, but this dead baby is not special to you; why think about or grieve for this dead baby first?
Of course, some kinds of social importance "grow back" immediately. It's a form of social importance just to be physically nearby - you will care more about someone who dies in front of you than about someone who dies on another continent, even if you have the same facts about each case. Someone biologically related to you, or who is a friend of a friend, will "grow back" a little bit too after the snipping - just like you'd care a little bit about a long-lost sibling you just suddenly discovered you had as compared to an unrelated stranger - but with regular maintenance from Chelsea, native consistency effects ("for the last five years, I have seemed to be the person who does not care about relationships of type X") will slow and eventually halt this regrowth.
Perhaps more awful, and perhaps not, depending on how you evaluate these things, is the fact that this sort of cognitive modification happens to people in the real world every day as a result of brain damage of various sorts.
Sacks writes fairly poignantly about this.
Agreed. To me Chelsea is the second-most-creepy thing about this series (mate bonds and imprinting being the most creepy, for reasons Alicorn has neatly illustrated).
Actually on second thought, Chelsea is number one. She can make a parent forget to care about a lost child. The mate-bond/imprinting thing is something I have to take on faith--it's magic, got it--but I have two sons, and so for me mother-love is the strongest, most all-consuming force I can possibly imagine. If it was stripped from me I would not be me any more. What Chelsea does is terrifying. If I had to choose, I would choose a lifetime of being raped by Demetri over losing my love for my sons. Chelsea is worse.
If I were your son, I'd unequivocally tell you to choose the mind-alteration over the endless rape. They're both horrible, but at least under the first circumstance you'd be happy.
I agree that Chelsea is terrifying in this story. In canon her gift is rarely ever talked about, and the narrator (Bella) never really experiences it in any way. The effects of Chelsea's witchcraft have been felt all through late Luminosity and Radiance though, and it's certainly terrible. I have hope though that those affected can restore much of their previous personality and relationships by way of re-evaluating their memories, and even quicker with help from Elspeth, who is very hard to doubt. If precious friends and lovers have been killed or otherwise lost though, they'll never be the same.
The Volturi always had the capability of being horrifying in canon Twilight, but because SM was writing it as a love story they had to take a back seat and be very inactive and stupid when present, despite all their experience.
I'm one of the Luminosity readers who never actually read the Twilight books. So I'm only dimly aware of departures from canon. Were people at least afraid of Chelsea? Did they consider her a major threat?
Well, sure. They suspected that should the Volturi force them to join, she would start brain-frying them into liking their superiors and want to please them. It was later revealed she would do this to any talented vampires the Volturi wanted that they came across, while breaking their ties to outsiders. But this was mentioned maybe once or twice out all four books. Eleazar and Carmen leave the Volturi unhindered, which isn't really the case in this story. I suspect the choice they were given here was to have severe restrictions on their freedom or be completely altered by Chelsea. I think she may be more powerful in this story, but like I said it wasn't really discussed in canon.
In canon, Bella developed her shield by learning to share it, instead of by adding immunities to it. By the time Chelsea actually appears, nobody we are supposed to care about is left vulnerable. She never does a single thing that we are supposed to find more than vaguely unsettling.
It might or might not affect this calculation that Allirea is immortal.
Errrrgh. It probably would.
Allirea has children, anyway. There's nothing incompatible about the horrible fates here ;)
I'm wondering if the other person Elspeth sees when she tries to 'talk' to herself is the manifestation of her witchcraft, which simply wants to tell the truth. If so, she should be able to use that to start doubting the way Chelsea has tweaked her to evaluate other people much quicker than if she were to begin re-evaluating her memories; memories that she may not trust with her new values. She has no reason not to trust her witchcraft however, so if she asks it about herself and what she thought of others before being Chelsea'd, she may recover very quickly. Once she's done this, she may also be able to help the Quileutes recover their original values. If not, then at least she can order Jacob around.
Wow, this turned out to be a stunningly accurate guess. Alicorn, did the above comment influence your writing process at all?
Nope, Magic being the second subagent was already my plan.
Note that Chelsea does a fair amount of maintenance work.
Does indeed seem like Elspeth put in her love for her mother in deep storage to be retrieved later, with the full force of the truthfulness that she's so good at conveying.
That "Forces of the Universe" spiel was a good sell, though; too bad that the alternative is, as you say, quite the monster.
And then there's Allirea, whose fate was left unclear as a surprise to no-one. Maybe she'll be there to meet the Cullens and Bella (who might have a bit of an advantage with being able to pay attention to her when others aren't, except whatever Eleazar manages with his "there's someone there" trick). They may be able to get some resistance going on after all.
Or, Allirea gets dragged back again, lather, rinse, repeat.
Moer.
I really liked the disposal of Allirea. Eleazar's interaction with Santiago there was priceless.
Agreed!
Poor Allirea, though--she's got to be running out of time before Demetri shows up.
Chapter 12 redirects to Chapter 1, though it shows up as links on the story page and Chapter 11.
Another reader caught this and I have fixed it. Sorry.
Note Chapter 12 can still be viewed through the entire-story page.
Chapter 11:
Is Allirea + Eleazar thing canon? It sure doesn't seem to follow from what we've seen before, unless Eleazar lied to Bella.
Although Nahuel has sisters in canon, their details are made up, including Allirea'a power and therefore how Allirea interacts with Demetri, Eleazar, et al.
Note that Eleazar did get a reading off Bella, albeit a brief and incomplete one.
Yes, but that incomplete-one means that his power can't override powers others have. Even if he could, after paying attention to Allirea, understand her power, it doesn't follow from what we know of his powers up to now that he could pay attention to her any more than any other person there. Even some sort of power-detection field would fail to reveal other than "There's is vampire that diverts attention paid to it in that general direction", if we assume it overrides her ability, which would make Eleazar severely handicapped in a fight anyway.
Yeah, and I wanted to say that you're treating the characters you create in an awful and cruel way. Stop that. They should be happy at least once in a while :p
Oh yes it does. Everything Bella blocks, she blocks completely, unconsciously, whether or not she knows there's anything to block, one hundred percent of the time - except Eleazar.
In Allirea's case, she seems to Eleazar like the least important person there, and would probably compare unfavorably with a squirrel if one should uncharacteristically wander by. But he can notice her, can remember that she is present, and can take actions dependent on that knowledge. And one of the things he can remember about her is what she does, which gives him enough reason to mistrust this evaluation of her that he can clobber her in a fight. (Vampire v. half-vampire = no contest, just no contest, unless the half-vampire is Allirea and her power is in full effect against the vampire, even if the vampire is not very good at fighting.)
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Fictional Characters, are we now? Sorry, I don't write that way. Happy endings aren't off the menu, necessarily, but happy middles are not my bag.
Then please at least don't drop happy endings of the menu. It might be a bit of escapism, but I like fiction because happy endings are more likely than in the real world.
Also, the almost happy short reunion was pulled of very well in my opinion. Elspeth couldn't have pulled it off alone, and the way you introduced Allirea didn't feel forced or unrealistic. Well done!
I love Allirea! I think she's my new favorite character in the story. I think she's kind of the pessimistic, unwilling comedic relief. It always brightens the mood when she suddenly pops up and everyone goes "Oh right, Allirea exists!", and it's fun because she's right there and may even be touching them. Another fun scenario is if her witchcraft doesn't work on Bella and whenever Bella would talk about Allirea no one would know what she was talking about unless Allirea chooses to show herself, or Bella learns to shield people.
I wonder why Bella's shield doesn't negate the effects of Pera's witchcraft. It has been explained what it can do, but the characters seem not to know how it works. Does it transport those hidden to another dimension where beings of their race and its subspecies (vampire, werewolf etcetera - all beings originating from humans) aren't present, but other races (plant life, other kinds of animals e.t.c.) and non-living objects are? Or does Pera release some energy onto the things she uses her witchcraft on that makes it impossible to detect with your senses, or like Allirea unnoticeable even though your senses can register it? I think the latter hypothesis is more likely, and so I believe Bella should be able to learn to be unaffected by it. If I'm right, then I'm puzzled as to why she was affected by it in the first place.
Yay! Apparently I didn't prevent people from liking her by having her first onscreen action be murder!
Bella isn't immune to just every power that happens to come along. There are plenty of powers that will affect her normally, mostly those that have nothing to do with affecting or investigating her mind. Pera's power does something close to the "alternate dimension" thing, but it's not illusion (if it were, they wouldn't have that problem where stuff can exist in the same place at the same time as long as one thing's hidden and one's not), doesn't rely on attention like Allirea's power does, and basically is not the correct class of power for Bella to be immune to.
It helps that she wasn't properly onscreen until the murder was over, and that the victim was more of a dazed redshirt than a fully-developed character.
Well, if you don't want your audience to be appalled by something, it really helps when your sympathetic viewpoint character isn't appalled by it either. I think Allirea's murderous introduction might be the most distilled example of that principle I've ever encountered, though.
I wanted my audience mildly appalled. In order to make sense of Allirea's motivations I had to introduce her as an imprisoned rape victim terrorized and controlled by the-guy-to-whom-she-is-mate, but she's not a harmless fluffy bunny and I didn't want anyone thinking of her like one.
(nods) If it helps, I'm appalled by many of the characters in this series.
It was extremely distracting at first, but by now I've more or less become accustomed to the "Well, yes, (s)he's a serial killer, which is, you know, tacky, but what are you gonna do?" cultural norm. It's amazing what you can get used to, really.
"Stalker" might be a good shorthand term for this.
Though, admittedly, a culture that assumes that of course you will live with your stalker and let them hug you and pet you and call you George has a... well, a different understanding of the concept than I do. (Ref "appalled," above.)
That's mostly because the Volturi are so terrifying in your story. Vampires and half-vampires who eat people without any sadistic enjoyment of their victims death and pain, I can tolerate when the Volturi exists. When they don't and some other evil organization hasn't taken their place, I still see vampires who feed like that to be an issue of suggestion and coercion. I'd try to have intelligent debates with them on why they shouldn't kill humans, or at least try to stick to criminals, and offer to help them do that if they're willing. The natural order of things on Earth is that all things die or are destroyed and recreated in some other form, after all. Without extensive research on the effects to society and the ecosystem of Earth if a large part of humanity were to be turned immortal (in age), I certainly wouldn't recommend trying it.
Anyway, Allirea hasn't shown any sadistic tendencies yet, except perhaps for what she might to do a defenceless Demitri, but that's all deserved. She's been taught to kill humans and to think herself as part of a higher race, it's not something she chose to do really. If she decides to stick with that belief after considerable evidence to the contrary I still won't say she's evil, unless she starts finding it enjoyable to terrorize people she now knows she may not have a right to do whatever she wishes with. Besides, I love all her quirks!
Aro and the Volturi however know all about morals but don't care a squat about anything that doesn't benefit them. I can imagine the Volturi of canon doing all this, but since it's a love story at heart SM didn't really write much about them and their deeds. If Alicorn's story is an accurate portrayal of how the Volturi act under pressure, then I fear the happily-ever-after of canon was simply a prelude to slaughter of naive characters. Demitri would likely check when the rebellion broke up, and then they would storm in and kill the Cullen's, Bella being their main target.
Yeah, this was more or less how I felt about it too. The Volturi were temporarily outmaneuvered and might have to wait a bit before getting what they want.
What? Canon has a 'happily-ever-after' in which the Volturi are not completely to the last man, woman and fiend? Crazy!
I thought you said things would calm down for a while after chapter 10 Alicorn?! Jasper and Edward sure went brain-fried by their mate connection. I had my eyebrows pretty high when Jasper described his impromptu battle plan, and it seems I was right to be sceptic, cause damn them vampires turn stupid when their mate is in trouble.
We're in need of some heroics here or there'll be multiple dead characters next chapter. I think Santiago will decide that only Edward and Elspeth are worth sparing out of this bunch. I doubt Bella will suddenly start owning with her witchcraft in this story though, so perhaps there's some other kind of intervention? Maybe Bella brought company. Anyway I don't see how Elspeth and co. would escape if they're brought back to Volterra again.
Yeah, everyone in the car except for David and Elspeth was completely driven by a single emotional imperative (Jasper: Save Alice! Edward: Find Bella! Allirea: Kill Demitri!) and they were all using their knowledge of each other's emotional imperatives to try and manipulate each other.
It's kind of a bleak scene, made possible, I think, by Chelsea. I mean, Edward makes a token noise about how Bella wouldn't want Elspeth used as a distraction in battle, but he doesn't feel the need to protect his daughter. If he did, he'd never have agreed to Jasper's plan. And in fact, if the normal bonds of family still held between Jasper and Edward, they each would presumably have been a little slower to risk the other's life so casually. But as it is, Jasper, Edward, and Allirea all feel they have nothing to lose, so of course they're willing to gamble everything on a risky plan.
You forgot Peter and Charlotte.
I did, you're right. They weren't much of a presence in this chapter.
Chelsea can certainly make people very predictable. If one has a mate, then all they're going to care about after being Chelsea'd is their safety, and they're most probably not going to trust anyone else with protecting them until they've rebuilt their relationships. If one doesn't have a mate, then he or she is going to care about his or her safety and no one else's, and it will probably take them a while to find allies they're able to trust with their life. If you don't trust anyone, it will be very hard to make a sensible plan and stick to it.
This makes me wonder if Edward won't just run away from the battle, if he hasn't somehow been incapacitated of course. If there seems to be no way to win or get Elspeth out of there, he would want to find Bella and stop her before she can get there.
Chapter 10 was all the breather you got, sorry ;)
You know, it would be highly amusing for Elspeth to, for some plot-convenient reason, have to try to convince a fundamentalist, say, that evolution is true. (Insert similar setup here; it doesn't have to be evolution, that's just the first thing that came to mind.) Does she work equally well trying to convince someone of a position in debate that she honestly believes is true? If so, she could be the ultimate espionage tool, albeit a necessarily oblivious one.
It probably ought not be evolution, unless Elspeth is actually in a position to give an account of human evolution that is consistent with what she knows about vampirism, lycanthropy, or witchcraft. In which case I would totally love to hear it, because I can't think of one.
Witchcraft, yes. Lycanthropy, at a stretch. Vampirism... not unless it involves cooevolution on Krypton! :P
Really? Now I'm curious. Let's hear it.
Her power does vary in effectiveness depending on how closely she has verified the thing she says (e.g. if at age four she said "My daddy is dead", this would ring true, but not as true as "I'm four", because she believes the first thing secondhand and knows the second thing firsthand). And it's not actually impossible to doubt her even at her maximum truthiness. She conveys that she isn't lying (and isn't a hallucination or otherwise basically untrustworthy), but she doesn't come off as an Omega-creature who is absolutely beyond the possibility of being mistaken.
We just saw this demonstrated, actually, in Chapter 11. Jasper is able to guess that Elspeth took the wrong meaning from Cody's story.
The "next" link at the bottom of Chapter 8 of Radiance links to Chapter 8 and not to Chapter 9.
Fixed, thank you.
Just wanted to comment- I really enjoy how you're portraying Elspeth's lack of experience with making decisions and how she's reacting to it. It's obvious she's been damaged by her parents, but she's reacting maturely. That matureness was somewhat shocking- it's rare that someone is the first person to think that they should grow up- but shocking in a good way. It's hard to show damage instead of just moping, and you're doing a good job of that.
Suspicion (that I hope is incorrect): Oryyn qvq trg xvyyrq guvf gvzr, naq fb Rqjneq naq Ryfcrgu jvyy unir gb fgneg bire jvgubhg Oryyn gb trg ure. Rqjneq, qevira ol eriratr, gnxrf qbja gur Ibyghev, naq nf Tvevngu fhfcrpgf Ryfcrgu orpbzrf n znwbe svther va gur arj tbireazrag.
Unlikely. Alice saw Bella, so unless someone is doing a remarkably good job of spoofing her (which is something that has not yet been mentioned as possible) Bella is alive. The only way I can think of, barring some entirely new witch, to spoof Alice that makes any sense is that Adelaide copying Alice can spoof her, in the same way that she can Jasper, and we know that Adelaide was last seen with an entirely useless power (Elspeth's) and has not touched Alice since.
Ch 9.
I wonder what a full conversation between Elspeth and Elspeth!Adelaide would look like. Indeed, what would a touch-conversation look like?
Chapter 9.
Heh. So Alice is alive too. The big question here, then, is the durability of Chelsea's influence on the witches. Will going back to Bella/Jasper and living with them as usual eventually reform the relationship bonds in question? It would be very odd if not; it would imply that Chelsea's power will permanently affect the vampire's ability to form an evaluation of the target in question, regardless of future experiences, and that's a bit more of a durable effect than is usual in this fic. If that is true, does Chelsea's power have a time limit?
Also, the wolves are still Chelsea'd to the Volturi. However, at least one imprint is free, and her wolf is quite able to split the pack in pursuit of her; I predict that a major feature of the presumable eventual plan to un-Chelsea the wolves will involve Elspeth speaking to Jacob. For that matter, what happened to the other imprints? If the Volturi have them, then that could torpedo that plan as regards all the imprinted wolves other than Jacob.
Chelsea changes the attitudes people have towards others. These revised attitudes are as durable as they would be if they'd formed naturally, once Chelsea is no longer touching them up on a regular basis. So, if she's completely destroyed an existing relationship, the participants in that relationship have to start from scratch, as it were.
There is no guarantee that what they build from scratch will resemble what Chelsea destroyed.
How do you quote or make HTML in general in these comments? I've looked around in the FAQ but wasn't able to find out how.
Chelsea was/is working on the imprints too, presumably so that they won't want to leave and ask their respective wolf to take them away or attack the Volturi. Now this was a very sad chapter in my opinion, even though we learned Alice was alive (which I had previously had privately confirmed by Alicorn, so no surprise there for me) and she reunited with Jasper. The effects of Chelsea's witchcraft really hurts. It's much more interesting in this story than canon, where it's barely spoken about but hinted that it isn't all that powerful - at least that's the way I saw it. Maybe that's just because the main characters never had to be subjected to the effects of her power in canon though, and consequently we didn't get an opportunity to witness it and the reactions of the characters.
It's very sad that these characters who used to love Elspeth now see her as little more than a hindrance to getting to their mates as fast and safe as possible. It's possible that will change when they are reunited with their mates and given time, and the situation with Bella won't be as bad as Elspeth makes it out to be just because she suddenly loves her second-most. She does need to grow up and work on her relationship with Jacob whenever that time comes, but first she needs to grow out of her sheltered self who relies entirely on her 'mama'.
I really really want Bella to learn to expand her shield to others. It's possible that just doing that once will erase any lasting witchcraft effects such as Chelsea's, especially since witchcraft are relative to how their owners believe they work in this story, and Bella is a master of getting her mind to do what she wants it to.
If the Cullen's (with considerable help from others) manage to defeat the Volturi and create a new vampire 'government', then I can totally see Elspeth as the radiant public figure who everyone is willing to listen to and easily understand, while Bella is an advisor who rationalises plans and presents them to others on the new government. I figure it unlikely that such a government would be willing to enforce Bella's views on killing humans, though they might be amenable to encourage it or find other non-fatal ways to drink human blood or put effort in finding an equally satisfying substitute. A new government advocating non-violence and freedom after exposing the dirtier deeds of the Volturi could be very successful, especially with leading figures acquiring their positions because of their abilities to fill it, not because they seem themselves as the masters of the universe and demand a ruling position. Of course, there will be many looking to exploit the downfall of the Volturi to gain power, but with the many witches of the original rebellion and any others who might decide to join the new government, they will be very hard to defeat in combat or penetrate with less than sincere intentions.
I truly hope that is where the story is going: the defeat of the Volturi and the formation of a new vampire government. I also hope Alicorn writes about this and doesn't call it quits when the major confrontation is over, because it would be very interesting to read about the creation of the government and the world's reaction to it, and later conclude the story when things have settled somewhat.
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Radiance Ch 8.
Experiments should've been performed to make sure Elspeth can carry out plans without remembering why, because Allirea believes it's very difficult and she should be assumed to know better (by both of them), and it's very important for this to work. Instead, Elspeth just "tries hard", and Allirea expects that to work, while it's apparently something that Saeed can perform only "because he has years' worth of experience being punished by Demetri every time he ignores this sort of intention". As I see it, they are both holding idiot ball in that situation, no matter how that actually worked out.
Next, Elspeth needed to "mutter lies", but it takes away some attention to invent new lies constantly, so obviously they should've checked if muttering the same lie over and over works as well.
Allirea doesn't have much riding on the plan. The Volturi can't kill her without permanently alienating Demetri, who they need, and he's the only person on staff she can't hide from. If things go pear-shaped, she just fades and tries something else.
They also can't kill Elspeth if they have any interest in being able to use Jacob.
It doesn't, which Elspeth knows (the relevant feature of the lies is how they affect her power, not Allirea's directly).
That an error has relatively small cost (though don't forget opportunity cost), is no argument for making the error, when it could be just not made. It costs nothing to not make the error, so the costs of consequences of making the error are not relevant, as there is no tradeoff.
Edit: Also, the cost is not small for Elspeth, so this argument I disagree with doesn't even address one of the two idiot balls.
It wasn't obvious that she can reliably feel the effect of lies on her power, and that there is a reliable dependence of efficiency of hiding-into-unimportance on Elspeth's perception of her power. The direct measurement is Allirea's sense of efficiency of hiding, and it's accessible to experiment, so it obviously should be tested (unless both of my questions in the first statement of this paragraph receive negative answers, which I can't see how can be done for the second one without testing).
Elspeth doesn't need to feel the effect of lies, she can just remember what worked better and what worked worse when she lied to people in the past, based on the reactions of those people.
I agree that it would have been wiser for Elspeth to take some time to confirm that she could carry out plans (of varying complexities) while faded and thus not remembering the reasoning behind her actions. But hey, she's 5. Probably a lot more brain power than a human child, but brain power doesn't necessarily equal sense. She can have the idiot ball for awhile.
Hmm, I suppose it's also possible that Allirea didn't really give her the option to think things over and be cautious. She told her the plan and then they did it, and once Elspeth was faded she couldn't think about that stuff. So maybe it's all on Allirea? Well, but speed of thinking actually is one of those things that would come with brain power, so if Elspeth was going to think of it at all, she probably could have thought of it in the time she had.
Allirea could have been more conscientious about confirming Elspeth's ability to hold up her end of the deal. Then again, if they found that Elspeth couldn't do it, maybe there's no alternative. Perhaps it's this or nothing. Experimenting wouldn't allow them to alter the plan to make up for Elspeth's inability, because there just isn't any other possible plan. So, it might be reasonable to just go for it, and if it doesn't work, oh well, not that big a deal, in Allirea's mind.
Possibly Elspeth, if she thought she couldn't carry out the plan, would have preferred not to do anything at all, for fear of harsher repercussions from the Volturi. But maybe not, if she is confident that they want to use Jacob and that that will limit how harshly they treat her.
Yeah, it's all maybes with me. :)
When Allirea fades someone else, Allirea herself is not affected by this. The test of how effectively Elspeth is hidden is how people other than Allirea react to her. Saeed lets her out of the cell, which constitutes excellent evidence that she can fade well enough to get the job done.
Yes, this tells that changing lies work. This doesn't address the question of efficacy of muttering the same lie.
Also, that "I'm 51, I'm 52, ..." works is indirect evidence that constant lies work as well, and proof-of-concept of how figuring out an efficient low-creativity algorithm can indeed bear fruit.
She noticed that Elspeth "announces her presence" loudly, which is a perception on the same scale.
Yes, but Allirea seems to effect people other than herself. And so if she hides Elspeth to everyone but Allirea, her perception of how "loud" Elspeth is won't change.
Allirea wouldn't be sensing how well her fading works on Elspeth. She would just be sensing how well Elspeth's "counter-fading" power is working. And it seems like she can sense that.
Chapter 8.
Surprise! Well, not actually surprise, given the usual dramatic cue of Bella never having found his jewelry in the ashes. Presumably, the vampire they burned there was Irina, who would have caused problems for the Volturi if they seemed to be in the way of not killing the wolves.
So in the future: Edward still has the mate bond to Bella, presumably, because it's stated somewhere (I think) that Chelsea is not powerful enough to harm that. Is Chelsea+Chelsea!Del enough? I somehow doubt it. In that case, if Edward can see Bella, then they will immediately align. So in the long term we probably don't have to worry about the psychologically-traumatised-Edward storyline, or at least he's unlikely to be killing people of it.
How does Chelsea's power work? It is stated that she killed all the relationships that the captive witches had with others; how does this affect their memories? Will Edward realise that Elspeth is his daughter? Will he if she tells him so, or shows him? Will his attachment to Bella spill over onto Elspeth and overcome the indifference-bomb? In any case, it seems to me that the best thing for Elspeth to do right now is (assuming she can get close enough) to immediately show Edward the highlights of Bella and Elspeth's life while he was captive, roughly: "Bella is alive", "I am your daughter", and "Bella wants me alive." This seems likely to get Edward out of any homicidal-vampire mode towards Elspeth, anyway. At that point, they can escape and finish the exposition later.
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?