MISC: The Girl Who Saved the World, Episodes 21 and 1

[Scott Eiler]

On 2016-01-10 20:22, George Phillies wrote:
> You are about to see a drastic change in the branching time lines trope.
>    The discussion of Liouville and Gibbs is real physics.
> After Episode 21 comes Episode 1A.  I decided to interchange the first
> two chapters so we open, immediately, with the lead character.
>
> Episode 21
>
> Two roast chicken sandwiches, all grain bread, plenty of lettuce, just a
> bit of butter, and more of the curried vegetables did quite nicely.  I
> postponed the ice cream and fudge crumbles until later. Water came to a
> boil while I was cleaning up.  Some parents would have been scandalized
> that I was brewing coffee, worse, cocoa-tinged coffee.  I really am a
> persona, not easily poisoned.  Coffee would make me a bit sharper while
> I was reading, but all the alkaloids would burn off soon after I
> finished reading, leaving me ready to drop into sound sleep.  Besides, I
> really am too young for chocolate to have its alleged effect.  I suppose
> if I always ate like this I would worry a bit about my figure, but that
> is one of my gifts. I may eat, but I remain leanly athletic.

heh, we all say that until we turn 23.


> After lunch it was clearly time for my next book.  I suppose I could
> start studying instead.  I could also have read a history. For some
> reason, Mum did not entirely approve my reading historicals. I agree
> that most books on history are pretty pointless. Here are these great
> men and women and their heroic deeds that you can copy. Here is a record
> of past ages and their mistakes, leading upward to the present when we
> do everything right.

heh, good point.


> If you don’t like moral histories, there are
> historical mysteries. Historical mystery books tend to be completely
> crazy.

... so something in this World made writers like Erich von Daniken a 
successful genre on their own!


> Yes, it is hard to understand how the eight different
> civilizations of ancient Washington, 2000 years ago, could clearly have
> coexisted along the Columbia River, had advanced science, technology,
> mathematics, and art, yet failed to notice each other.  Even if they
> weren’t all there at exactly the same time, whichever actually came
> later might in their historic records occasionally have noted ruins of
> the past. No such luck.

Hmpf, depends on their tech.  Maybe they sucked the world's Primal 
Forces dry, leaving people like us to depend on fossil fuels - and the 
Namestone!


> My target today was one of Mum’s forbidden books.  Liouville’s
> Butterflies makes remarkable claims about historic time.
 > ... The famous story is the fellow who traveled
> in time to just before the maiasaurs started their march to
> intelligence, smelled a flower by shooing away a butterfly, and when he
> returned to the present there had never been a dinosauric civilization.
>    Most small changes have tiny effects, but some are different.

That's an interesting plot hook.  What kind of change makes the world 
all different - but Austria-Hungary still ever existed?  And wouldn't it 
be interesting if that sort of change-driver crashed in from Beyond? 
... Not to anticipate or drive your plot or anything.  8{D>


> Episode 1A
>
> The Girl Who Saved the World
> Text copyright © 2016 George Phillies
>
> Meet Eclipse.
>
> She's pretty, hardworking, bright, self-reliant, good with tools.  She’s
> everything a twelve-year old girl should be.  She also flies, reads
> minds, and is not afraid of necessary violence.
>
> Now she’s procured the Key to Paradise. And everyone in the world will
> be happy to kill her to get their hands on it.

If she's just twelve years old, wouldn't at least some of her enemies 
say, "But You're Just a Giiiirl!"?  The big Valkyrie especially might.


> Chapter One -- Flashforward
> The Invisible Fortress
> Evening
> January 11, 2018
>
> ...I’d recovered that palm-size sphere of crystalline sky, the
> Namestone, the Key To The Earthly Paradise. No one else in the history
> of the world had ever come close, but I’d done it.  The Namestone was
> the wonderful birthday present I gave myself, a couple months late for
> my twelfth birthday, almost as good a present as my ponies. The ponies
> were a better birthday present, not to mention I gave them to me a
> couple months before my twelfth birthday.

An eleven-year-old girl sometimes loves like a mature twelve-year-old 
girl cannot.  But I'm a boy, so I did not mature as quickly as girls do. 
  I was *thirteen* years old before I abandoned childish things like my 
fandom of certain sports stars, and instead moved on to studying things 
like Austria-Hungary...  Heh.

This episode told me more than I ever knew about the protagonist.  And 
this story shows more potential than ever now.

-- 
(signed) Scott Eiler  8{D> -------- http://www.eilertech.com/ ---------

When you *are* the leader... whatever goes wrong... whether you did it
or not... *you* are held responsible. - Barack Obama

I know. - Archie Andrews

- from Archie #617, March 2011, scripted by Alex Simmons.