LNH/Contest: Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2 #34

[Andrew Perron]

On Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:56:54 +0000 (UTC), Saxon Brenton wrote:

Yay!

>      This made no sense, prompting Renegade Programmer to ask, "What's 
> chocolate?"

*gasp!* *DUN DUN DUNNNN*

>       Occultism Kid gave him an unreadable look, then said, "Up until 
> sometime only a few hours ago, it was *the* most popular confectionary 
> on the planet.  Now, nobody even remembers that it existed.

Oooh.  How Carmen SanDiego-esque!

>      "That's fine," replied Occultism Kid.  "Just checking, really." 
> Renegade Programmer, however, was reading with the start of a scowl on 
> his face.  Not so much from concentration, but as his dismay turned to 
> growing anger.  There was a whole category of snack foods... a really 
> big category... that had been stolen.  That bothered him very much.

Character point!  +2!

>      He had quickly determined that there was no chocolate to be found 
> anywhere in the Looniverse.  However there had been clear indications 
> of chocolate in other universes, so he had made a quick trip across to 
> Looniearth-B to acquire some in his TANDI, his magically powered 
> space-time travel machine.  

Has this shown up before?  Also, I read this as Looniearth-Y at first.  I
was hoping for a stealth crossover! ;.;

>      Apparently Xochiquetzal guesses what he is thinking, and says, 
> "They are small.  Very small.  Once they were a race of flesh and blood, 
> but when they ventured into space they engineered new bodies for them-
> selves and engraved their consciousnesses onto specks of metallic dust."

I'd prefer something with lasers.

> He has a horrible premonition of not just 
> chocolate, or things associated with chocolate, but things associated 
> with things associated with chocolate, lapsing out of existence as the 
> Yama Nictrama methodically and wrong-headedly take the world to pieces 
> in pursuit of their objective.

Eesh.  That'll do it.

> Their current state of 
> being mires then in a materialist worldview, which if nothing else 
> explains their reductive attempt to find god.

Ooooooh.  Interesting point of view.

> Then before they have time to react he drags them upwards 
> to a plane of being that will be better for them.  Not necessarily 
> where they want to be, but definitely where they karmically need to 
> go.  Then for good measure he gives them a metaphorical wap upside the 
> head with a compulsion to explore their new environment and not come 
> back until they learn to behave themselves.

Nice!  Wish you could do that with humans, but they probably wouldn't
survive the trip as well.

>      And that was how a completely new type of chocolate - red chocolate - 
> came into being.

Worldbuilding! <3 Yay!

>      The Yama Nictrama are loosely based on the noocyctes from Greg 
> Bear's novel _Blood Music_ - which incidentally explains/handwaves their 
> cosmic levels of power: billions upon billions of tiny intelligences 
> were doing so much Observing of the world that that in a funky 
> Schrodingerian-technobabble way they were able to manipulate reality on a 
> quantum level.  (Or at least, I think that's the handwave from the climax 
> of the novel.  It's been over a decade since I read it.)

Ooooh.  Makes sense.  That's *almost* as good as lasers.

(Also, I thought Blood Music was that short story where a guy's individual
cells become self-aware.)

T'was a well-told story.  I was just surprised wReamhack and Renegade
Programmer didn't show up again!

Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, who didn't even try for this challenge.