Grrl Power #1358 – Here’s my gene code, so super me maybe?
Dabbler is kidding with the “In space…” line – mostly. Not that she didn’t say “God’s domain,” she said “gods’ domains.” She was intentionally malapropriating the line people try and dissuade mad scientists with. You know, come to think of it, is there a less successful argument? Has anyone in any movie ever said “You’re tampering in God’s domain!” and the scientist goes, “Oh my gosh, you’re right! I’ll quit immediately!”
In the Grrl-verse, mana really only exists on planets with abundant, sentient life. Planets with sapient life usually have more. Well, not like if there’s 30 people in a research station on an Mars. Planets with a long history of plant, animal and sapient life have the most mana. All that is to say that space doesn’t have much mana. Magic still works there, but you have to supply your own source of mana, like pre-charged wands or other enchanted objects, or mana batteries of some sort. Personal mana will still recharge, but usually much more slowly, and any techniques that absorb or convert ambient mana work at an absolute crawl.
An all that is to say that gods don’t tend to keep an eye on deep space, and rarely travel there, as their personal mana is fueled less by biological creation of mana, and more by the absorption of aspect appropriate mana. Which isn’t to say gods don’t generate their own mana, but most powerful beings like that are loathe to leave half or more of their capabilities behind to go tooling around deep space. Besides, most magical forms of travel don’t handle the immense distances of space well. That flight spell that gives you 60 movement per round? Space laughs at your puny velocity. A teleportation spell? Even if it says “line of sight,” well, guess what? That doesn’t mean you can teleport to the moon. You usually have to be able to reasonably visually discriminate your destination. It’s really “line of sight… through a medium that is relatively mana saturated.” Portals like summoning circles work, or inter-realm (which in the Grrl-verse is really inter-planet) transport like the Bifröst work, but they take asinine amounts of mana, and usually work a lot more reliably if there’s matching gates/sigils on both ends. But straight up deep space? There’s not a lot of reasons for a god to hang out there, and most communication and divination spells don’t work well without there being mana to bridge both ends of it. Again like the portals, it will still work, but the mana costs shoot up enough that even gods wouldn’t recreationally divine the heavens for doing weird shit at the fringes of their aspects.
Oh look! The vote incentive has an update!
It’s not quite where I wanted it for this update. I kind of skipped over posting just the flats and started shading Heatwave, but hadn’t gotten as far as J-Watt. But I figured I’d post what I had.
I’ll hopefully have more progress soon as things here are kind of slowing down. Still putting the house together after the move, but there’s still plenty to do. The Patreon version is updated as well.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
“Has anyone in any movie ever said “You’re tampering in God’s domain!” and the scientist goes, “Oh my gosh, you’re right! I’ll quit immediately!””
I think that’s the primary reason that human cloning was nixed and made illegal in RL. The moral implications.
Oh and I think the Steve Wozniak-type scientist in the Sixth Sense used that as the reasoning for why he wanted out also. But the Steve Jobs-type businessman didn’t.
Mankind have been ‘tampering in gods domain’ ever since man first discovered how to make fire
Mankind have been “tampering in gods’ domain” ever since man first made up the notion that gods are a thing that actually exist.
Hey we stole that fire from the gods fair and square then pinned it on Prometheus.
That is correct, and it’s why people still die waiting for organ transplants and rejected organs instead of getting organs cloned from their own DNA. Considering the first successful mammal cloning was almost 30 years ago, and the first successful cloning of a partial animal was a year after that, it’s safe to say scientists would have figured that out by now.
U.S. did. China did not.
U.S. told Harvard International students not welcome there.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology said, Welcome here, open invitation, and we’ll help you with your Visa and housing.
That would be over a decade after the current period of this story, if it tracks.
The ‘gods’ implied in the commentary seem remarkably puny for such a designation.
That’s what Hulk say
:P
In the Verhemence fight Dabbler brags about having killed a few.
Costing them at least their full immortality.
They also seem to be semi-local, since they’re more of a thread in Gygaxia as mentioned two pages ago.
Another thing is.
Dabbler is no more than nuke dangerous with a certain focus on magical beings, so these Gods can’t really be much stronger than a team of well equipped Dabbler associates and serious equipment.
Dabbler tells her “friend” to watch out for elite level adventurers implying that at least groups of them could form a threath to him.
We actually have some indication what a team of Dabbler associates can do.
The Fel battle.
They can messily destroy a Fel warship.
Implying that these Gods aren’t much more powerful than a squadron of Fel warships.
you can be a god with a bic lighter and a handgun if the people are dumb enough
The whole “tampering in God’s domain” thing was a aspect of “mad scientist”. The old, original concept. Not as a crazy person of science, but someone who is so absolutely batshit they have *rejected God*, and are doing Things Man Was Not Meant To Meddle With.
Like… make his own fire? and fly?
What about turning a viscous killing machine into something small enough to fit in to a handbag?
Creation of life itself, entirely new creatures. Think Frankenstein.
You… do know Frankie wasn’t real, right?
So? This is fiction, too, and Dr. Frankenstein is THE titular mad scientist.
tell that to anyone who has received a body part from a donor
That’s not the same thing as what Frankie did, and you should know that
hey now, the parts were all ‘donated’
So are the gods in this setting more like mana elementals? Or a race of immortals with dominion powers (who may or may not get a power boost from worship), it doesn’t sound like they are super tulpas (faith birthed and faith reliant to continue existing let alone be stronger with more faith in them).
As opposed to actual celestial beings, higher dimensional beings, or other entities that could reasonably also be called gods under the genetic banner of (really powerful so we pray to it or give offerings in the hope it helps us)
Depending on the mindset, Maxi could be considered a god, an actual living golden statue
She definitely has a golden calf!
If you imagine worlds as having ley-line mana bridges, requiring both worlds to have mana, it would be a good way to check if manaforming has succeeded. Send a servitor from world A(live) to World B(arren). When the manaforming is complete, mana will migrate up the bridge, finishing the link and completing the teleport. This only works if the lack of mana results in an incomplete travel that isn’t fatal.
Is the invotive’s labelled wrong? It went “Kissu-01”, “Kissu-02” and now “Kissu-04”, but the thumbnail went “99”, “98” and now “97”
My pet grammar peeve is when people use “much less” when they mean “or even”.
Be… cause they don’t mean the same thing
“or even” would not work in that sentence, unless you rearranged the whole thing
A ‘pet peeve’ for me, is when some tells someone else how they should speak, specially someone who does not natively speak that language (or simply come from another country who have their own idioms)