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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)
I want to register amusement that "Methods of Rationality" contains a Bella and "Luminosity" contains a Harry.
I just wanted to say that Chapter 55 made me go from "the luminosity fic is good" to "omg I need to get people to read the luminosity fic!".
One rule for emotionally compelling stories is "make a character you love and then torture them" and Alicorn has done that very very well. At this point I don't know if the story can have any kind of happy ending, but the story has transitioned from one where the default happy ending can pretty much be assumed (because most stories have so much wish fulfillment), to one of the rare stories where implacable reality is described by the author in the way you would expect an implacable reality to work.
And I love the way it is the "rationalist character" who, in retrospect, was sort of "blithely rational" who got hurt. This is a lesson that is meaningful for me, helping me to emotionally internalize the real risks of experimenting with one's life, rather than a lesson that I can imagine is meaningful for normal Harry Potter fanfic readers. When the pack was expanding and things were clearly getting out of control I had a bad feeling and wanted to warn Bella, but I didn't really expect negative outcomes.
Thank you, Alicorn, for writing this.
Well, with the story over, I've just got to say - I'm massively impressed.
It actually encouraged me to read your sequence(far more than MoR) simply because of how insanely productive you were. Eliezer has an exceptional update schedule, but you're like a machine. Post-singularity.
What surprised me the most was, perhaps, that the story forced me to take sparkly vampires seriously. Previously, I had an instinctive /facepalm reaction to them, whereas now I've got to admit, that a more skilled writer than Meyer can certainly make it work.
All in all, there's only two things left to say: Thumbs Up and I Need My Luminosity Fix Plx!!!111oneoenoe
Your enthusiasm is heartening. The sequel, Radiance, will start updating Nov. 8, and I plan to stick to the MWF updates with 4k+ words/chapter.
Seconded.
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!
Ok, I know I'm late to the party, but I feel the need to comment about the Norway chapters. First a minor nitpick: You would not need to learn Norwegian to interact with people working in an international airport, nor indeed with people working on a remote farm in the uplands. (Although it is, of course, courteous to do so.)
Second point: Wolves? In the vicinity of Bergen? Ah... no. Not at all. Norway is not very densely settled by European standards, but come on; it's not the Canadian outback. There are something like 150 wolves in the whole of Scandinavia, mainly around the Swedish border and up north. The Norwegian wolf population is about 20-30 individuals and they're all in the eastern part of the country. And what's more, it's an endangered species. Where does Bella get off killing one?
I share your sentiment. I would go as far as to say that I would respect her more had she opted to eat a human by preference. Not that it would be necessary. For crying out loud, eat someone's pet cat.
Were I myself a part of Luminosiverse I would, it would seem, look down upon Bella with the same sense of moral superiority that she has for 'carnivores'. I wouldn't go as far as fighting her over it - her threat to worthwhile novelty in the environment is still trivial compared to humanity and she would have at least some usefulness in achieving other worthwhile goals. It also isn't like she has a fundamentally unacceptable overall goals. Just messed up priorities when it comes to sorting between lesser evils.
Are you actually saying that according to your values the life of a sapient human is worth less then the life of an endangered wolf?
My values, transposed into the position of a vampire in Luminosiverse, yes. I would be a predator, choosing among prey of two species that are not my own. There isn't anything magical about humanity and there is real value in maintaining a whole species. Particularly something as awesome as wolves. More so in a universe in which the species has magical significance.
As I mentioned, I'd eat someone's pet cat instead. But if it came down to a pure choice between eating wolves to extinction or eating a human then vampire wedrifid would eat a human.
Ultimately, if you bite the bullet on "Shut up and Multiply" then it turns out that you have to Shut up and Divide as well. A single human just isn't worth six billion times as much as the wolf species. In Bella's case she isn't doing a whole species worth of damage in one feed (which is, of course, hard to imagine) so the multiplicative factor isn't quite so large. But even so, her choice isn't a good one. Particularly given the ridiculous number of alternatives she had available.
Bella also can't be expected to Shut up and Multiply. If she follows in the author's footsteps she does not even implement consequentialism. But Bella's reasons for behaving unethically are not important.
It may be worth pointing out that it is only the Scandinavian wolf population that is endangered, not the species as a whole; there's a lot of wolves in Russia. But still, given that the declared policy of the Norwegian state and, presumably, people (disregarding the dang farmers, who ought to get with the gains-from-specialisation program already and stop trying to farm in subarctic conditions) is that we want to preserve a wolf population, it's rather rude, as well as illegal, for a guest in the country to eat one. Not to mention unrealistic, in that finding a wolf anywhere near a fjord is really quite unlikely.
If it came to a choice between a wolf and a human, I would definitely eat the wolf; but that's not the choice Bella faces. Let her find a moose.
On another subject, I'm not quite sure about the ecological impact of 'vegetarian' vampires. They are clearly apex predators, and they are pure carnivores. There are not that many moose in any given area, much less killer whales; you would think they'd hunt out the local populations pretty quickly, and someone would notice. I suppose they can eat rabbits and lemmings, which nobody would miss, but if Bella can drain the blood of a killer whale in one sitting (!), how many rabbits does she need in a day? Something is weird about the energy flows in the Luminosiverse.
I apologize for the imaginary depredation of endangered species. I just googled "Norwegian wildlife" and picked something. It became a minor conversation topic later so I don't want to edit it out. In fairness, Bella has no reason to know the conservation status of the Scandinavian population of any megafauna, and Edward is trying desperately at that point to get her to eat and knows carnivores to be more appealing than herbivores, so in the (perhaps wildly unlikely) event that he smelled a wolf near a fjord, he would encourage her to eat it and she'd have no reason to reject it because it has few friends.
Good point.
It has vampires that look 'graceful' while at the same time accelerating at inhuman rates despite near-human mass. Vampires have vulnerabilities to other vampires and to wolves yet resistance to other physical attacks that is in no way proportionate with respect to physics. Yes, it's best just to consider the energy flows 'magic' and leave it that.
Yes there is. Humans are sapient.
BTW, what do you find so magical about maintaining a whole species?
I almost commented on that the first time. It struck me as a red herring. Sapience is not even a universal feature of humanity. There are animals that I have known who are 'possessing of more wisdom and discernment' than the least among the humans I have known. Sapience is not the greatest distinguishing feature of humanity and I seriously doubt that you value humans in proportion to their degree of 'sapience' in practice.
I like wolves. I like novelty. No other reason is needed.
Out of curiousity, could you give some examples and (ideally highly detailed) evidence? I'm curious to know, particularly how you managed to measure it.
Having been a human seems to be a strong argument in favour of unfairly privileging them over other species, even endangered.
Wait, why should your values change just because you're suddenly immortal? Or is it because of the magical value of wolves in the luminosiverse? This doesn't make sense.
Although I don't, my best guess is that he puts a value on biodiversity.
You don't put any value on biodiversity? As in, if you had the choice of destroying all biodiversity in the world that isn't directly necessary to human survival for benefit to you of one cent you would take it? That is cold.
I'm starting the sequel, and mostly wanted to say thank-you to Alicorn for writing this: I think Radiance has the potential to be even more interesting than Luminosity, mostly because it's almost entirely original. Also, Elspeth is really very likable, which is very important for this story to "work."
I would echo the comments of the reader who wrote earlier that the story seems to lack much in the way of sensory description. Since we're seeing through Elspeth's eyes, I wish we got a lot more of how things look, feel, taste, sound to her. For instance, I was wondering through the end of Chapter 2 and most of Chapter 3 whether Elspeth was attracted to Cody. Up until she kissed him, I had no idea--and for a character whose superpower is "making herself clear," that's being pretty opaque. It's mostly because the only physical description we got of him was that he's Native American and wearing a ponytail. Nothing about whether his features were blunt or keen, his eyes lively or soft or guarded, his build broad or skinny, his hands strong or delicate -- none of the things, in summary, that girls tend to notice about boys when they're interested.
Just as another example, I don't have a picture in my mind of the werewolf camp AT ALL. We're told there are "tents" but are we talking about individual-type camping tents, or big military tents, or what? How are they handling trash--is there a big midden heap nearby? Are they burying their waste? What about recreation & social space--do they have sporting or sparring areas? Are the tents organized around a central campfire or other social space? If this is a semi-permanent enclave, knowing how the wolves are organizing the basic requirements of communal living can tell us a lot about them and their organization, and this is the kind of info that we can get a lot of just by really seeing through Elspeth's eyes as she glances around.
Again, though, the story is really enjoyable so far. The sensory descriptions would just help it be more immersive (and I think they'd be appropriate given the nature of Elspeth's powers).
Just wanted to note that Chapter 4 gave me more of the description I'd been missing--I have a better image of Cody now. I also really liked Cody's run-down of the pack dynamics because I'd been thinking that social tensions could get completely insane in a situation like the one Jacob's pack is in. Elspeth's concerns about kidnapping seemed perfectly reasonable to me too.
It also seemed "realistic" given the situation and the character that Elspeth couldn't keep her mom's secret, though I'm sure Bella wouldn't be pleased to know it.
I don't know, I thought that
was a pretty strong indication.
I loved the first half of this story. But since Bella became a vampire, I found myself liking it less and less. But it was only with Chapter 55 that I realized why.
Bella went FOOM.
I hate it when that happens.
Maybe Elspeth will take it slower. Something more friendly, a bit more in line with the Collective Expectations of Vampiredom.
Looking forward to the sequel.
Ha!
(what? that's just how I laugh)
I had the same reaction - and I love the crazy spiraling-out-of-control in HPMoR, but it just doesn't feel right in this story. Luminous Bella does need flaws for the story to work, but really shouldn't have the same blind spots as Rationalist Harry.
All the same, even though the second half is somewhat less engaging for me, I'm still loving the story, and it's helped me make more sense of the LW Luminosity sequence.
Wait what? If I did that I made a serious mistake. What blind spots do they share?
Not all the same blind spots - I exaggerated and I shouldn't have.
But in particular, I would expect Bella to have take quite a bit more time to think about the question, will awakening the Quileute really help them? She rightly realizes that the Quileute are in a dangerous and precarious position, but immediately panics and pulls the first lever she can find, instead of thinking for a week or so - or at least a solid hour that the reader sees - about whether that will really make things better.
She should have a pretty significant prior expectation that there's going to be some major consequences to Awakening, given what happens in the closest analogue she's experienced, Turning. A newborn vampire is darn hard to restrain - so why should she assume she has a good chance of experimenting on Rachel without being detected?
She doesn't really strike me as impatient in this way in the first half of the story. I guess it's plausible that the high stakes spook her into uncharacteristic haste, but really, the fact that Aro could "remember" the Quileute at any time doesn't quite imply a "something must be done/this is something/therefore this must be done" kind of response.
Of course, she makes this mistake in her own, distinctive personal style. For example, she does actually bother talking with at least one of the people who would be affected before actually going out there. But two of Harry's most distinctive flaws are Extreme Other-Optimizing and Experimenting Before Thinking, and Bella makes both of these simultaneously by awakening the Quileute.
Actually, it looks to me like that mistake happened because turning shook her out of good habits. She stopped writing journal entries, supposedly because she has perfect memory; but the main benefit of that was consolidating and analyzing thoughts, not preserving them. On top of that, she didn't consult with anyone, because of the mind-reading issue. She thought vampiric super-memory was a substitute for her old cognitive toolkit, but it wasn't, so she ended up doing something very stupid.
This kind of insight is why, from a rationality perspective I love the twist in this story. This is so good at showing the causal density of real human systems and the disasters that can come from falsely concluding that you have a causally correct theory about why you won when you win and why you failed when you fail.
How could she have been sure of this? Where would she have needed to direct her rational faculties to pull this hypothesis up out of all the other hypotheses about what went wrong?
It seems plausible that what Bella needed might have been some specific insight applied at or before a specific chapter, but the menu of things it might have helped to adjust is enormous and any particular fix might have had its own negative side effects that we aren't seeing in the story because they weren't applied.
For example, one of my own personal heuristics is that I should generally delay any action that has "epistemically irreversible" consequences until I am either (1) forced into the action by external circumstances and the need to "make a bet for survival one way or the other" or (2) I have identified post-change mechanisms that will allow the new situation/framework to identify its own flaws and dismantle itself if it isn't actually for the best.
Based on this pet theory and post hoc rationalization about Bella, I might argue that the place where Bella went wrong was in becoming a vampire and accepting apparently permanent modifications to her mind despite not being forced into it by a true emergency or verifying that the post-modification state passes the "self critiquing reversibility" test.
As Vaniver pointed out in the previous comment thread, now she appears to be trapped in a Punisher comic book that's almost certain to have an unhappy ending rather than living in a romance novel. Instead of living for pointless revenge she could have still been flirting with a dangerously hot boy who will magically be a good husband when the relationship is magically made permanent.
Of course, in a rationalist universe where magical thinking runs into implacable reality even the romance novel may have been a bad outcome for luminous!Bella. Romance novels have to stop when they stop, because otherwise the end of the story arc would be about a woman married to a mobster or a sociopathic nobleman or a pirate or (ahem) a vampire, and that is totally not what traditional romance novels are about.
Possibly, but keep in mind she has evidence that this irreversible transition would make her better at improving. Not wanting to become superior because that might make you overconfident is a pretty self-defeating strategy; though constantly checking plans for signs of overconfidence is a good plan. (That is, if she thought about it beforehand and was more self-aware, she would understand journaling is valuable as more than a memory aid, and keep it up or find a substitute as a vampire. But she'd be able to journal / self-critique way better as a vampire than as a human.)
...is not what I'm talking about.
The self-critiquing-reversibility test is designed specifically to prevent apparent self improvements which are not actual self improvements and from which you cannot retreat. If the test is passed then it should give you more room to play and explore because you actually have a safety net in the form of a "bailout option".
The test is designed to prevent you from, for example, getting addicted to a purported nootropic that turns out to be more like crystal meth than like caffeine. Avoiding "belief in the value of irrational belief" is another place where the heuristic might be applied.
For Bella, thing vampires can't do include turning off their desire for blood, or changing their emotional connection to their mates. These are, in some sense, "permanent utility function tweaks" rather that simple "optimization power upgrades".
If Harry had applied the test in the first handful of chapters of MoR, he would have asked McGonagall if it was possible for him to explore the wizarding world but then back out somehow if he decided it was better to be a muggle instead of a wizard after educating himself about the costs and benefits of both states. The best answer from McGonagall (though I don't think she can actually do this, which may be relevant) is "Here, let me take veritaserum... Now... Yes, easily, because memories can be erased with an obliviation spell and returning to a naive state will be basically the same as never having learned about the wizarding world in the first place, but you'll find that the cost benefit analysis is unambiguously positive because of things like X and Y which appeal to you right now. The biggest downsides are P and Q and similar issues which are obviously negligible in the face of X and Y."
Absolutely. Resilience and naive optimization are often in conflict.
The highest expected value strategy in investing is to put all your money in the single investment that itself has the highest expected value (assuming the opportunity is large enough that your whole contribution doesn't push the project very far down its marginal utility curve so the last dollar invested will have lower return on investment than some other investment). Nonetheless an index fund can be a better strategy based on variance estimates and more or less sophisticated risk of ruin calculations combined with the value of "avoiding ruin". Nearly all billionaires are massively "over invested" in their own companies and they frequently stop being billionaires for this very reason. The fortune 500 has substantial turnover decade-over-decade in part because a company has to sacrifice some resilience to get onto that list and in the long run (since corporations are potentially immortal), a lack of resilience catches up to them.
This is what I was trying to get at with the link about causal density. Applying the epistemic reversibility test too diligently can be inferred from first principles to hurt you if you are in a "get big fast" regime where the only survivors are lucky risk takers. Or maybe it can hurt you for some other reason I don't know about yet that will make more sense to me if I apply it some day and then get hurt in a novel way...
And, honestly speaking, for any given heuristic I consciously apply, I expect to gain some benefit, while generally expecting to get hurt sometimes. If I keep doing novel stuff with an eye towards rational self improvement it seems inevitable that I'll get hurt in a way I wasn't expecting - however it seems reasonable to suppose the damage will be limited because I'm on the lookout for it. In working in this area at all I'm either implicitly or explicitly guesstimating that there is an upside to "rationality in general" that beats the downside.
Rationally speaking, it would make sense to make the risks of active rationality cultivation explicit and then subject the the calculation to conscious analysis, and then abandon active rationality cultivation if the expected value is honestly negative. It is precisely the fact that rationality basically demands this kind of bailout analysis at some point that has generally helped me to feel safe(ish) when experimenting with this particular package of memes.
I think this is the thing that bothers me most about Bella's plan. It's plot-induced stupidity (but I don't blame Alicorn for it, since Meyer came up with Aro's power). If Bella vocalized or wrote down her plan, even once, I find it hard to believe she wouldn't have subconsciously examined its assumptions and been struck by its idiocy. Maybe that benefit is particular to me- I find the moment I try to explain my thoughts to someone, the holes become readily visible in a way they wouldn't be if I just examined them myself- but I imagine many people experience that.
If Edward weren't lovestruck (and/or optimistic), he might have warned Bella "look, I trust you, but just in case you're planning to make Aro, the guy we've been talking about, unhappy in any way, he has the experience and the history and the malice necessary to ruin all of our lives. Don't mess with Aro."
If Alice weren't blocked by the La Push shapeshifters, then she might have noticed horrible events on the horizon when Bella decides to activate the werewolves. "Bella, is there a reason I suddenly can't envision myself?" Not sure about the future-blocking and the temporal range of Alice's visions, but it seems likely she would note blankness spreading from Bella to everyone and say "hey, Bella, what's going on?"
It seems likely, from the way it works in canon at least, that Alice would be able to figure out something horrible is going to happen- she sees Bella jump off a cliff (and doesn't see Jacob catching Bella). Similarly, she might see Bella burning in a pit (but not Leah hunting Bella), but the similarities there are somewhat strained.
(Also, sudden thought: what if the "this one" they killed was Alice? Seems tremendously unlikely- Edward is the only one the follow-up statement makes sense for- but isn't contradicted by any evidence so far.)
Upvoted for the phrase "plot-induced stupidity".
Useful concept. On analysis, I find that a lot of my own stupidity occurs because, if I had thought it out a bit more, my more rational choices would spoil the dramatic narrative that I construct by behaving more intuitively and less rationally.
Plot Induced Stupidity is a trope.
It also makes sense for Irina. She would be dead set on eradicating the very useful new servants of the Volturi, a sufficient reason to kill her. I haven't read the Twilight books but I think that in canon they kill her for wasting their time.
I'm also fairly sure Irina was the one burned above the pit. Alicorn provided many hints that Edward may still be alive: he is never mentioned after Bella is shredded by the wolves; Bella can find none of his jewellery, in the ashes or anywhere else; Bella's widowed depression is by comparison far from as extreme as Jasper's, Marcus' or even Irina's.
He only had the one ring.
This is not to be taken as evidence for Edward's survival. Vampires do not have mate-sensing ESP above and beyond their normal ability to detect the world around them.
Ooh, good point. Objection withdrawn.
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.
Chapter 13 is so, so, SO creepy. I feel like I need a shower now.
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.
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.
The end of the latest chapter manages to be even bleaker than the one before it.
I'm officially scared now.
I agree. I didn't expect that it would get that deprressing when Alicorn wrote we might not read the sequel because of our deep hatred for her.
It's even more tormenting that she leaves hints that usually in fiction would mean that Edward isn't dead (not directly mentioning the name during the burning scene and the missing ring).
I don't think that will happen in this story.
Created wiki page.
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.
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.
There's a thread about Luminosity on TV Tropes, and one person had a bundle of questions that I answered there; crossposting here in case anyone's interested.
Unspecified in canon; in Luminosity, no, everybody winds up mated to someone of approximately the correct "type" for non-magical attraction.
Again, unspecified in canon. My ruling: If you have a person A and a person B, and they are vampire mates (or one is a vampire mated to the other, a human), then A is attracted to B's whatever-mishmash-of-sex-and-gender-characteristics and vice-versa. Once the actual magical bond kicks in (i.e. once they meet), then even departures from this mold will not affect it. For instance, a vampire who is attracted to female personalities but not female bodies would have to meet a MTF transgendered mate before significant biological intervention took place, but if they met first and then interventions happened, this would not bother the vampire.
I don't have a way to confirm the hypothesis in the story (exactly how would anyone verify what the imrprinting is for?), but yes, that is what it's Officially For. Imprinting can override native homosexuality (in fact, there is a character for whom this happened; I'll go into that a bit in Radiance). It would not "override" transgenderedness in any meaningful sense (wouldn't give the physically male, mentally girly wolf a different, masculine personality), but it could make her attracted to (a) woman if she weren't already. Werewolf super-healing and wonky body chemistry would make any attempts to physically transition intractable before quitting one's wolf. Quitting the wolf doesn't end the imprint, and neither would hormones/surgery/whatever; once it's there, it's there.
Once the imprint is there, it's there. Imprinting can override native asexuality like it can override native homosexuality. A werewolf born infertile would not imprint; one that was sterilized later would keep an existing imprint if there was one but not make a new one if there wasn't.
Unspecified in canon; I rule yes and yes, although it'd be a difficult sort of relationship.
Yes, but it'll traumatize the wolf rather a lot.
In case anyone's wondering, I find this entirely plausible. (I can't speak for any other asexuals, though.)
I don't know of how one would verify what imprinting is for, but you made a number of conclusions and rulings based on the idea that imprinting was indeed for finding the best possible mate. If one of those conclusions were wrong, that would be a piece of evidence that indicates that mating is not, perhaps, what imprinting is "Officially For."
The sequel to Luminosity has begun. Chapter one on my site; on ff.net.
The recent chapters are dark. Love it.
That's one way to keep things balanced. Give Bella a new power (minor physical shield and flame retardation) but take away her lover and best friend (incidentally the two most powerful witches she has at her disposal). Oh, and while you're at it have the enemy recruit her greatest brute-force allies to their side. Maybe have her brother in law try to kill her. Perhaps a good way to set up a "rationalists don't always win!" moral. :)
I wonder if Bella may not be able to make use of Jasper. She should have a decent chance to defeat him in combat. She should be slightly stronger than him (residual newborn strength vs carnivore) while a whole heap more strategically competent. Apart from being somewhat more dominated by bloodlust he is also barely sane and his combat advantage from witchcraft is missing. Their current injuries are comparable (torn off arm vs 'left his hand back there somewhere').
Assuming she can tear him apart she could possibly send him against the Volturi. Talk to his disembodied head and remind him that he must hate the Volturi almost as much as he hates her and that killing all of them may be as pleasurable as killing just one of her. That and remind him that he'll never be able to find her anyway.
Leave his body in a great vat of fresh blood, with his neck attached remotely to his head via strained elastic. Have his head suspended above the vat ready to be released by a call from a mobile phone. Leave him in Italy. Leave a vest loaded up with a (literal) ton of explosives, napalm and an 'on release' trigger. And a map saying 'you are here' and 'them'.
I wouldn't risk it myself. There is a chance that he will just tell them Bella is alive. He seems stupid enough to do something that will mostly hurt the rest of his adoptive family and not Bella at all.
If I actually was in Bella's shoes I'd probably just kill Jasper. Stop pretending I'm a boy scout earning pocket money and start stealing cash. Like whole ATMs, that sort of thing. Then I'd move to Italy and start preparing to kill the Volturi. Rigging all the surrounding area with explosives, creating walls of fire. Firebombs of a suitable weight and with suitable payloads that I could lob them inside said ring of fire. That sort of thing. Witchcraft is overrated. :)
I'm going to re-number the chapters in edits, so I don't advise using current chapter numbers as reference points. There might not even be 25 chapters after I'm done.
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.
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.
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 ;] )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
You forgot Peter and Charlotte.
I did, you're right. They weren't much of a presence in this chapter.
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.
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).
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.
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. :)
Chapter 7.
I'm going to assume almost the whole chapter isn't meant to be in cursive font and that you made a typo somewhere there. I'm only going to write a few thoughts I had on the chapter. First off, Bella is hella quick to come up with very possible hypotheses on what the Volturi will do, how and why. I really hope she got away this time too, or at least survived. Now, if I understood this correctly (it was really confusing to be honest), then it seems to me that Elspeth is most likely in a cell with a witch who can make those around her ignore hers and maybe others' presence. Elspeth notices this person but seemingly decides she's of no importance at all, even though she certainly should be. Her mind probably went all over the place trying to ignore the stranger killing Carlo while also trying to figure out what was happening to him. He didn't know what was happening either even though he could most probably plainly see her feasting on his neck.
If the stranger has this witchcraft, then I wonder how the Volturi are keeping her captive, and captured her in the first place. It seems unlikely that they would have someone like Bella who can shield against such mental illusions or attacks. Perhaps the guard can counteract it if he knows she's there and focuses on her all the time from when he opens the door until he closes it. If that's the case, then Elspeth may be able to help her by taking his attention off of her.
I also noticed that it took quite some time for this stranger to attack Carlo; maybe she was 'vegetarian' or a newborn who tries her best to resist. If she's newborn it's quite possible she was captured by the Volturi to be changed, or was in the process of being transformed when captured and then forgotten or assumed to have somehow escaped when her witchcraft got a power boost with her change. This may explain why they put Elspeth in a cell with a vampire, but they may also just not have cared about the safety of their prisoners. If she's newborn maybe she is too confused to escape, and isn't aware of what she can do.
Elspeth also seems unhid, or else the guard, the stranger and Carlo are all hidden (and I don't believe that for a second), so if her hypothesis that Del can't unhide her because she'd copy Elspeth's gift before she can use Pera's, then we must assume the Volturi made Pera unhide her and most likely everyone else who didn't manage to avoid capture. Unless Pera died and her witchcraft was nullified of course.
It will be very interesting to see how Elspeth manages to escape together with this stranger who may be even better at hiding than even Pera. After all, what better way to hide than being able to stare those hunting you in the face only to find them walking past you, continuing the search. I wonder how that would work with Demetri. He'd probably breach whatever the range of her witchcraft is, proceed to ignore her presence and look under every stone in the area, knowing she's there somewhere, then inevitably stumble outside her range and try to figure out what in the hell just happened. Maybe he'd tip-toe in and out and eventually find the answer to if vampire's really can go crazy (not counting Jasper).
The most similar witch I can think of at the moment (it's 04:33 here so I'm rambling) is Renata, only the stranger is more powerful if she can project over an area or other people. From what I've gathered about Renata her witchcraft simply rejects anyone with an intention to harm those under her protection; they still know the target is there, they just can't attack it. The stranger seems to make you think you don't want anything to do with her when under her spell. You don't want to sense her or think about her, and you certainly don't have any intention to interact in any way with her. It's an extremely powerful self-preservation ability that also has the potential to make her very lonely. If Edward really isn't alive, then I demand that this girl become Bella's second mate!
Hmm. That ended up being more than a few thoughts...
EDIT: After reading this, I've decided that 'the stranger' has a nice ring to it. Please please please make her be a newborn with little to no memory of her human life. :)
I really liked the paragraphs describing "the stranger" -- I thought it was a nifty bit of writing.
Fixed.
Yep.
Wouldn't you like to know.
That is not a thing that happens.
Chapter 6.
Oh boy! So let me try crystal-balling: Bella either kills or turns Pera or is stopped before she can do fatal harm or bite. It's also possible Elspeth could suck out her venom should Pera be bit, I guess. Brady is sure to attempt steam-rolling Bella in any scenario, but Jacob should be able to halt that attempt quickly. Even if he can't or won't, Bella is very unlikely to die considering they'd have to be chill with dismembering her and then continuously lighting her on fire, all the while ignoring Elspeth fighting for her mother; something Jacob cannot do.
If Bella is somehow stopped before she can get at Pera, and is thwarted from trying to so again, then everyone except Elspeth will most likely be quite peevish with her. It's also very likely that Pera just so happens to be Bella's yummy singer. Either that or she was extremely hungry, which is also a possibility if she was stupid enough not to feed after reassembling herself. Elspeth also noted that Pera's blood smelled very good. Maybe mother and daughter have similar tastes. I imagine Bella will have some difficulties travelling with the pack should Pera be her singer, though it will do wonders for her self-control should she learn to resist her.
If Bella kills Pera, it is likely that either Bella or Brady will have to die, since Brady won't stop trying to kill her. The pack or what is left of them after this confrontation obviously lose the ability to 'hide' with Pera in this scenario; cue Volturi slaughter and slavery.
If Pera starts turning, and Elspeth either can't or is too late to suck out the venom, then they most likely lose the ability to 'hide' during Pera's transformation due to her not really being in a state to concentrate, and may also find themselves with quite a large contingent of Volturi on their heels during that time. When she wakes up she'll maybe be all kinds of more awesome than she already is, have a sudden desire to chew on all humans present, relationship issues with Brady and be a little peeved with Bella and life in general.
In both above scenarios, they're all very likely to suddenly pop up in a relatively seclusive location in the middle of NYC with a woman screaming her lungs out - or a dead woman, and a ravenous vampire doing her best to devour said woman. I'm going to bet on the latter scenario of Pera being turned vampire because Alicorn has already gone out her way to explain what would happen to a wolf-imprint relationship should the imprint be turned vampire. That and the PeraVamp and BellaVamp combo could be verrrra awesome should Bella actually learn how to use her witchcraft in any other situation than playing dead, and Pera could probably help her with that.
I believe that the traditional way to do this is to tear her limb from limb. And then keep the limbs and stuff separated. Well, that presents us with both a TV Trope and a LessWrong Trope.
Interesting, but I'm getting a little tired of all the mayhem. I mean I'm all in favor of Lois McMaster Bujold's idea of how you create plots in character driven fiction - "You ask yourself 'What is the worst possible thing I could do to these people?' and then you do it." But the worst possible thing you can do to vampires and five and a half year old half-vampires is just not comparable to the worst possible thing you can do to Captain Cordelia Naismith. She escaped with just a few broken bones and the loss of her government job.
Sorry. I expect there to be less mayhem starting around chapter 10. At least for a breather.
I'm in the market for a second beta reader for the fic. [EDIT: I have found one, but I don't object to acquiring a greater number if someone else finds the prospect appealing.] Job description:
Be on an IM client a lot (bonus points if you keep different hours from the beta I already have)
Receive pastes of drafts of Radiance sections as I write them (in raw HTML)
Listen to me hammer out future plot details (including those which will actually come to fruition and therefore constitute spoilers)
Be discreet about any fic contents or information that I haven't published yet (for some unfathomable reason, there exist people who don't like spoilers, and I don't want them harmed, so I prefer to handle spoilery inquiries personally and in private)
Supply (via aforementioned IM client) feedback on the fic pastes and outline, in the form of comments, questions, attempts to point out plot holes, gentle critique of prose, silly jokes, &c. (Key here isn't making the fic better; I can mostly handle the quality to my satisfaction. Quantity is trickier and requires that I feel like my writing is getting attention, which is what the beta and this feedback is for.)
Interested parties can PM me or find my contact info on the fic website's About page.
I still have too many "dead hours" when I want someone to write at and all my existing betas are offline or busy. Anybody interested in betaing? (I'm curious about why not, if not and it's not an obvious reason like disliking spoilers or IM or Radiance.)
Up to Radiance, Chapter 4:
Did anyone else think "oxytocin!" when they read this? :-)
...
I'm trying to imagine what to expect when the two "werewolf chromosomes" are sequenced and this helps clarify those expectations a bit. The really crazy part about the chromosomes is that is seems likely that the "compatibilism genes" seem to be woven into a regulatory structure, hooking some "as-yet-uncharacterized magical physics" to "well studied biophysical systems" in ways that are obviously complex adaptations and substantially implemented in the genes themselves.
In MoR the in-story working compatibilist hypothesis is that there is a single compatibilism gene that is blindly pattern matched by a very complex magical system, which gives organisms with two copies of the compatibilism gene privileged access to a magical interface of some sort. All the regulatory elements of the magical system in MoR are, by hypothesis, fixed in some magical medium that is outside of the "atoms in motion" mechanisms that modern science is making intelligible. Casting spells accesses the interfaces. Learning the interface may ultimately be the only way it is possible to gain information about the magical medium. Building a spell casting robot without using DNA may simply be impossible.
With the vampire and wolf chromosomes (and witch genes?), there's a distinct possibility that there are things like "mind sensing proteins", "atemporallly sensitive proteins", "telekinesis proteins", "magical neurotransmitters", "clairvoyance organs", or something with physical structure and magical function that interacts by simple physical means with simple physical systems. If a werewolf chromosome was sequenced, and bacteria were used to grow werewolf proteins, I have no idea what precisely to expect, but it seems at leat 50% likely that however things turned out to work, the mechanisms could be learned and re-used so that engineers could eventually create designer proteins/organs/whatever that were more magical than existing magical proteins/organs/whatever and these could be integrated into biomechaincal(?) systems to create "supermagical tools".
Or not depending on what the microbiologists discover :-P
And then in the meantime the existence of all this complexity sort of demands an explanation as to the source. How could such chromosomes evolve? Are they artificial chromosomes? Maybe there is a whole new hidden species ("science gnomes"?) that create the artificial chromosomes which are still hidden or extinct? Or maybe theism is the only intellectually honest answer? Maybe an entity (a god/demon/ghost/author/whatever) instantiated in a purely magical medium gained access to the world by calling complex physical structure into existence ab initio, and the compatibilist mechanisms are complex because it didn't occur to the entity to produce something other than chromosomes?
Being honest and genre-aware, my sense is that the author of twilight just said "chromosomes" because she thinks of chromosomes as semi-magical entities anyway, so mentioning chromosomes just seemed to add magical plausibility for similarly minded readers rather than raising a thorny nest of scientific and philosophical issues for the smaller group of people who intuitively grok materialistic reasoning.
Hints like the oxytocin thing keep reminding me that there's a lot of physics and a lot of open questions left to be worked out in this universe!
It would be neat if Elspeth is forced to work out more rationality than her mother had, with her mother serving as inspiration and warning, and then Elspeth might stumble into some of this. This site probably has a lot of material that could be borrowed to show a plausible rationalist origin story if that's where the story is headed :-)
I have some thoughts on chapter 2 of Radiance. It's very interesting that Jacob's pack has a former 'kept' wolf. He should have a lot of information on the Volturi and the 'kept' packs. It's unfortunately also quite probable that he should know whether Edward was actually killed or not, and since Cody said Elspeth's parents were both killed it's safe to assume Brady either somehow doesn't have any information on that or that Edward really was killed.
I guess we'll also see if Elspeth is Jacob's imprint next chapter. Personally I'd like it if her mate was female.
I suppose it doesn't matter too much given that vampires and, I believe, female half vampires are infertile but surely there is scope for one of the luminosity specific romances to be heterosexual. The Gianna match is going to be hard to top in cuteness after all.
Come to think of it what I would like to see is a mystically enhanced but non-monogomous relationship. As a hybrid herself Elspeth is a perfect candidate for being in both forms of Twilight's magical codependency. A 'pair' bond with a vampire and an imprinted wolf. Could be fun. Could even allow for some novel applications and extensions of Elespeth's power.
Given the fic's interpretation of what imprinting is for, Jacob's imprinting is in fact proof positive that Elspeth (at least) can have (wolf!) children (at least with him).
Were half vampires in the wolf imprinting mechanism's training data?
Doesn't matter. It's magical.
Ah, a magical classifier for a magical category. ;)
I really liked this:
Should I read Luminosity if I disliked Twilight? Does it matter why I dislike Twilight? Can I read it if I never finish Twilight?
(I tried reading Twilight this week. Got halfway through it. The writing style is very workmanlike - good at describing the surroundings, and just enough other important details to move quickly from point A to point B in the plot. Descriptions of Edward are limited to monotonous repetitions of "perfect" and "beautiful", and descriptions of Bella are absent. None of the dialogue is clever. All the boys fall for Bella, who is not interesting; and her reaction (only wants what she can't have) is repellent. The central love story is unconvincing, but is a little interesting because Edward is unpredictable. So far, it is an efficient vehicle for romance-novel cliches. I may finish it, but will feel guilty if I do.)
Maybe.
Yes. If you hated the vampires, don't read Luminosity. If you hated the writing, read Luminosity. If you hated the supporting cast, don't read Luminosity. If you hated the protagonist, read Luminosity.
Yes. You can also read it if you never started Twilight.
I'm told that Bella's heart is basically a separate character, as it's forever obtruding into the narrative with its pounding, racing, throbbing, etc.
... I'm pretty sure she got over that eventually. ;)
I don't think it's still necessary to warn about the text color. You can change it by clicking the correct part of the sidebar.
I just copy and pasted from the first discussion thread. Fixed now :-)
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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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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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?
No public comments, no.
Something just occurred to me.
In canon, one of the reasons it was speculated that Alice's visions blanked on half-vamps and werewolves was that she had never been one--she used to be a human, even if she can't remember it, and she was a vampire, but she has never been either of the other two.
But at this point, Elspeth is running around with plenty of memories of at least two half-vamps (including herself) and at least one wolf (as Edward stated that he could read Aro reading Rachel in ch 55 of Luminosity[1]. It's also possible that Aro's touch-telepathy would work through the involuntary telepathy of the wolves to read all of them at once, but that's not highly relevant at this exact moment). She also has the ability to share those memories.
It could be that if Elspeth shares those memories with Alice, Alice will then be able remove those blank spots from her visions, as having years of memories, years of experiences, from these kinds of being that she never has been is enough to overcome that obstacle. Or it could be that despite how much she would remember being a werewolf, she still never actually was a werewolf, any more than she ever was a male, and the blanks would be unaffected. Or it could be that her power works on some other basis completely, and this whole line of inquiry is a dead end, if an interesting one.
[1] I may be mistaken here, as ch 31 of Radiance confirms that Elspeth has Allirea's memories, meaning that Addy read Aro who had read Allirea in the past 5 and a half years, but that might have been before the wolves were captured, which was, I believe, around five years ago...My grasp on the timeline may well be in error here, but I am curious.
Er, wait, when Elspeth blasted Demetri, she hit him with "the last five and a half years of Allirea's life." So...Allirea had been w/ the Volturi for five and a half years the last time Addy read Aro, which was...May 26 (ch 21 & 30). So Aro almost certainly has memories of werewolves, thus Adddy did, thus Elspeth does.
Did I miss anything?
Here are the broad strokes. (Let me know if you want the dates of other events.)
January 17, 2005: Luminosity opens.
October 2005: Assorted hell breaks loose (partial list in order: Irina finds out who killed Laurent and tips off the Volturi; the Volturi descend upon the wolves; Jacob summons Bella; the Volturi send Demetri looking for Nahuel's sisters; he finds them and helps himself to Allirea).
November 4, 2005: With Allirea in tow, the Volturi nab Alice.
April 4, 2006: Bella encounters Jasper.
May 10, 2006: Bella finds Elspeth.
May 20, 2011: Radiance opens.
May 26, 2011: Last date of Addy touching Aro. Aro was reasonably up-to-date (within a month or two) on the Volturi and Volturi guard at this time, including Allirea. He doesn't keep quite so up-to-date, temporally speaking, on the wolves, but as of this date he has read all the then-in-village alphas and imprints (as they came in, to determine how to cover up their disappearance to the wider world), and about half of the village wolves who were activated when first brought in.
May 27, 2011: Elspeth and Jacob's pack are captured in New York.
May 28, 2011: Elspeth and Allirea jailbreak.
May 30, 2011: Elspeth & co. arrive in Denali. IT'S A TRAP! Some hours afterward, Bella shows up, encounters Allirea and Eleazar, and gets the former out of there.
June 8, 2011: Elspeth is first recruited as assistant brainwasher.
July 1, 2011: The events of "Weaver" take place.
July 3, 2011: Demetri starts looking for Allirea.
July 4, 2011 (no pun intended): Addy is sentenced to death and memory-blasts the Volturi compound and escapes with Elspeth and Jacob.
July 8, 2011: Elspeth's current party arrives in Alaska.
Thank you, this is very helpful. (edit: Erm, out of curiosity, when was Addy picked up by the Volturi? Please and thanks.)
So Elspeth certainly has several sets of memories from werewolves, on top of the half-vamp memories she has from Allirea and herself, at least. It's possible for the theory to be tested in-universe, then, dependent on getting Alice back on their side.
That's a shame, because it's fairly hilarious.
It's definitely a risk, but it's also a huge power boost for them. Keeping them in the base seems logical to me (they should be under the heaviest possible guard and the closest possible supervision).
Really enjoyed the cliffhanger ending to this chapter.
There's no reason for them to reassemble all of the witches at the same time. It would still be stupid even if the room was full of guards. Having only a single point of failure preventing 16 powerful enemies from waking up in a room with only 2 defenders, plus any invisible enemies that might have been brought in, is the Biggest Ball of Idiot in Minnesota.
They knew Allirea hated Demitri, could turn invisible and could wake the witches just by touching Del. Yes, that would let Del get a sneak attack, but that would only last until she touched one of the other witches, or one of them touched her. Allirea only needed Elspeth because she couldn't rely on Chelsied vampires to cooperate with her plan to kill Demetri.
There actually is a reason, although it's one of convenience more than absolute necessity. To keep vampires alive while normally maintaining them in fragments, they need to be fed pretty often, and on a tight schedule if they want any safety margin. They can't just be kept in small immobile chunks indefinitely. It's quite a production to handle the healing-and-feeding phase (Alec or Alec!Adelaide needs to be available, you need to fill up whoever feeds them so their food doesn't get stolen by inadequately fed guards, you need to have extra food on hand for the witches themselves, etc.). Heidi has to make a bunch of trips for extra food. She has to range farther than usual to get it so there won't be too many concentrated disappearances all at once in the near environs of Volterra. This all takes a while. Someone else could take on some of the hunting duties, but except for Heidi!Adelaide, nobody is quite as well-equipped to unobtrusively bring in an entire delicious tour group all at the same time, and Adelaide usually has other people to copy and other tasks to accomplish. Every extra guard they put in the room is somebody they have to saturate with even more blood so they can handle being there.
The best candidate for the idiot ball action here is that they didn't time the capturing of Jacob's pack for when the witches had already just been fed and were in harmless bits and pieces.
If you amputate all the limbs, is that a problem for continued survival (assuming potential preservation of limbs is not relevant for Voltury)? Why do you need to attach limbs when feeding? Why must they be kept unconscious, if without limbs they can just be fixed in place, with no way of escaping? This won't necessarily be enough for the few abilities that could allow escape or sabotage even without moving, but that doesn't apply to, say, Edward, and without limbs the situation is strictly better in any case, while removing the limbs supposedly costs nothing.
They could move a little even without their limbs. If kept conscious and intact, they could talk to each other and coordinate, re-forming any relationships sufficient to escape with the creative use of their powers even over Chelsea's attempts to sever them. Edward in particular wouldn't be much of a danger this way, obviously, but they're adopting a consistent strategy for the entire group.
Now you've gone and put all sorts of images of comical vampires into my mind.
Look, you stupid bastard, you've got no arms left.
Just a flesh wound.
What are you going to do, bleed on me?
I'm invincible!
Come back here and take what's coming to you. I'll bite your legs off!
What about some sort of iron maiden approach: a steel block with the vampire contained inside, one hole to their mouth to feed them, one hole near the leg or back or something so that Del could reach through and copy their power?
This gives the Volturi the advantage of portability: it wouldn't be easy to lug a hundred tons of steel around, but forklifts could allow relocation and such, or the transport of several vampires that Del needs to swap between on-site.
If there's a way of designing a cell so that a vampire can't use their teeth on it (as Elspeth appeared to have encountered) it should be doubly possible when the head is restrained.
You get to feed the captives less often, there's no need for special precautions around them, a prison-break from outside is definitely going to fail unless they bring serious cutting machinery (blowtorches, obviously, are right out).
It's also much, much crueler.
A vampire could just dig out of Elspeth's cell. Elspeth is not a vampire, and cannot do that. The cell is specifically for half-vampires.
...Like a vampire?
Or a saw fashioned from the harvested teeth of disposable newborns! Actually biting through a few tons of steel myself seems rather undignified. :)
Like a vampire without his teeth, jaw, hands or feet?
Constraining vampires is basically a trivial task given time to prepare. Their magic just isn't all that impressive compared to engineering. The confining-is-implausible rule is going to be one that is best supported by narrative decree (or idiot balls) than any real coherence with the physics.
That it's not in itself a complete solution, is not an argument about the security value of this precaution. They can't escape on their own if their limbs are destroyed or (say) stored on another continent.
What of it, they should be kept in cells in any case.
Or kept in solitary cells.
"Consistency" (simplicity, rather) is a poor argument for picking a bad strategy, making a possible disaster worse. If only 5 extra-witchy vampires escape, it's better than if all 16 vampires escape. It also expends more resources of maintenance. As you wrote:
They don't usually know this. She's usually too inconsequential for them to remember.
Not at all. Chelsea doesn't alter memory or even personality, just adjusts how people evaluate other (non-mate, non-imprint) people as important or un-. Chelsea-plus-chelsea!Adelaide are faster and stronger, but the same basic rules apply (no snipping mate or imprint bonds, no creating new relationships without any foundation).
New chapter (7).
Will you stop ending on cliff-hangers already!
Speculation: The stranger is Pera, turned; Elspeth has been somehow kept unconscious (maybe Alec, or just repeated blows to the head) for the three days required, and Pera's power evolved enough to make Elspeth not recognize her. It's a bit of a stretch. Maybe instead the stranger is just another Volturi witch? I don't think any of the so-far-named ones have had powers that let you do that. It's a bit annoying to keep having these new powerful witches introduced just in time for their powers to be used.
Props for the writing on Elspeth's reactions to the stranger. I did a few double-takes there, wondering if I had missed something.
No :P But I will keep updating on schedule so you don't have to wait forever for each cliffhanger to be resolved (...and immediately replaced).
Note: If anybody shares my love of spoilers, aversion to surprises, and hatred of the itch of not knowing what's next, you can contact me privately with questions and I will actually answer them, if you agree not to independently spread the information.
The character and power have been named before, but one could be forgiven for forgetting them. (Pun intended.)
Wow. This is so awesome. I've never seen an author offer to do this before.
And that is the great frustration.
Don't get me wrong. It's a great story, and I thank you for writing it.
Would it be too spoilerish for you to point me in the direction of the reference? (Am I correct in assuming that once I saw it I would recognize it? I don't feel like rereading all of Luminosity and Radiance at this time.)
See chapter 21 of (condensed) Luminosity, and chapter 1 of Radiance. I don't know enough about your skill at catching stuff to know if you will catch it.
Thanks for the reply. The only common thread I can see between Luminosity 21 and Radiance 1 is Joham, and I can't see any mention of his power. Maybe I'm just missing it.
It seems you are. Nahuel's eldest sister is mentioned to have witchcraft that diverts notice from herself by becoming uninteresting, so the stranger is probably her. Again I wonder how the Volturi captured her. Jasper said the Volturi had one of Nahuel's sisters with them to block Alice's vision of the attack, so either that was her or they searched for Joham and captured some or all of the sisters. If the eldest sister has been in Volturi possession for over five years, then maybe she recently did something that got her sent to the cells, or she got captured recently and isn't willing to cooperate.
As old as she is, she probably has a pretty good grasp on her witchcraft, so if it's possible then she should be able to escape by herself, if not then perhaps Elsepth can help her. It will be interesting to see what kind of personality you have going for her. In canon I think it's said that Joham has made them think of themselves as goddesses, although that belief may have been stunted by their capture and - I presume, Joham's death.
I read the first chapter of Radiance again and I assume the only reference to the stranger is that Alicorn provides names for Nahuel's sisters for the first time: Allirea, Noemi and Iseul.
Am I the only one who, having not actually read Twilight, thought that the character of Eleazar was a shoutout to Eliezer?
Before I introduced the (canon) character Eleazar, I actually posted a comment stating that he was canon to forestall exactly this reaction.
Glad to see Luminosity continuing on (the quite insanely productive) schedule.
Speaking of insane, Pera is quite a munchkin, but yeah, wouldn't have much of a resistance anymore without something like her what with the shitstorm that was the end of episode one, ergo not much of a story.
Sounds like they should try hiding stuff overlapped with other stuff. I mean, sure, it could have explosive consequences, but hey, nothing too funny happens when it comes to interaction with the displaced air, so it's probably not too dangerous. And if it's dangerous only to the subject, it'd be insanely good for picking out Volturi.
...so I doubt that, would suspect some sort of compelentary displacement going on automatically as a safety feature - it'd be too easy otherwise. Though, could one embed a vamp into a hidden steel block? If the whole block would shift back, what would happen with a hidden pile of earth? One would suspect that for storytelling reasons it'd just fail if there was lots of solids overlapping.
Which still leaves one with the possibility to create steel enclosures where a vamp fits in, place them strategically and/or lure the subject in and tap them on the back. Should be able to keep one restrained long enough for a good flamethrower job, yes?
'course, the opposition, if in group, has the option for immediate indirect attacks covering the area, but seems to me like a relatively solid, if limited, offensive regardless.
She seemed like just about the minimum entity I could postulate and still have Jacob's pack running around as they were.
I say it's insane not to be a munchkin! :)
I wish this sequel had long phase where things just flow peacefully. First chapter was fun, but I fear that things are gonna get messy after that sort ending.
Read chapter 2.
Oh dear.
Is the Chapter 57 that's up now the official ending?
Yes, but there will be a sequel. The first chapter of the sequel will go up on Monday, November 8, and update on the same schedule that Book One did.
Would someone be so kind as to message me what this apparent 'twist' is? I don't remember much as far back as chapter 25 and can't think of anything in particular that would be required by that circumstance that would make me overwhelmed with awe, hint or no hint. (And if spoilers were good enough for Shakespeare's prologue's then they are good enough for me!)
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.)
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.