MISC: The Girl Who Saved the World part 61

[Drew Perron]

On 4/5/2017 10:48 PM, George Phillies wrote:
<snip>
> “This was a top-chord third level schema, perhaps touching fourth.  It
> was a considerable nuisance to remove,” Morgana said.
>
> “I see.”Krystal bit her tongue.  The number of people who could place or
> remove a fourth-level construct was vanishingly small.

Hmmmm, fascinating. I feel like more little bits that expand on the 
moments of worldbuilding, like this one, would be appreciated.

> “Joe was the young man who rescued Janie and sister from the Perversion
> Circle, two years ago,” Morgana answered.

I'm slightly confused. Did we know this already?

> Also, after Joe rescued Janie,
> something marched through the Castle Island Jail, exfoliated the
> kidnappers’ minds, and neutralized the Perversion Circle.

"Exfoliated" is such a wonderfully disturbing way to put it.

> There are some really first rate
> personas mmovingmoving near the Wells family, without leaving enough of
> a trace that I can identify them.”

That's nice and creepy. (Also, note typo)

> Chopped onions, chopped green pepper, chopped portobello
> mushrooms, chopped sausage, all sautéed in olive oil with garlic and a
> nice dose of curry powder, followed by two eggs whipped up with a bit of
> milk, and I had a nice omelette.

:9

> I still visited my ponies, hugged and
> curry-combed them, checked their hooves, and spent a while petting two
> cats. Then it was back to Liouville’s butterflies.

^.^ <3

> I can’t claim I’ve had a lot of experience dealing with people who lie
> out of habit. Mum gave me some abstract lessons. Yes, I’m a persona.
> I’ve met a few criminals. Most of them were dead afterwards. Some were
> less lucky.

She's such a creepy Batman. o#o

> When I skimmed later parts of the book, it was really
> obvious that the people who did not want to believe the Liouville-Gibbs
> theorem were prepared to say almost anything in order to discredit it. I
> don’t know if they were lying out of habit, but they were certainly
> working hard at lying, for no particularly obvious reason. Indeed, one
> of the later chapters, one that I much enjoyed reading carefully, spent
> its time going through the arguments against the Liouville-Gibbs
> theorem, and explaining exactly how the authors of the arguments had
> cheated in making their cases. Learning how people cheat in arguments is
> good.

Is she autistic? Because this feels really relatable.

> The book really wasn’t all that long, a couple-three hundred pages. The
> 30 pages of theorem had been really demanding. That’s assuming ‘really
> demanding’ is a synonym for ‘mostly incomprehensible’.

IT IS. @-@

> Well, except for the strange
> chapter on the Dagger of Time. The Dagger is not the same as time
> travel, but it somehow ignores cause and effect because it lives
> sideways to the flow of time. The chapter was imprecise about whether
> the Dagger was an artifact or a person, or both.  On the other hand, the
> chapter was very clear on why the Dagger appeared.  It existed to
> correct side effects when people were using time travel.

Holy fuck cool.

> The chapter was very obscure. It also
> didn’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the book. The
> chapter author claimed to be a Prioress of the Goetic Knights, an office
> that ceased to  xist thousands of years before the book was written,
> who said she had used time travel to make what appeared to be tiny
> changes that actually had the desired effects. The Dagger of Time
> cleaned up the minor issues the Prioress had left behind.

Damn that's cool.

> Time travel
> requires enormous amounts of power.  It was only on rereading an obscure
> sentence that I realized that the Prioress appeared to have used the Orb
> of RetCon.

!!! eeeeeeee :3

> There were a bunch of places, like almost all of
> them, where I had to take the word of the author that the math actually
> did what she said it did.

This is what it's like being scientifically literate in our society. @-@

> It was still a marvelously strange result. How
> could a world start out totally different than ours, and end up very
> nearly the same as the world we live in? I suppose the answer is that
> it’s the same as ‘a world almost like ours at the start can end up
> totally different at the far end’. A world that started like ours ends
> up very much like some other very different world, so people on that
> other world and its neighbors would see that totally different starting
> points could lead to almost the same present, the one they lived in.
> Those people are not in a special place, so our world has the same
> property.  Some nearly-the-same presents very much like ours had very
> different pasts.

This is what I always assume for oddly-similar alternate universes.

> Once I told myself that, I decided that the book’s
> conclusions actually were kind of obvious, even if I might never have
> thought of them myself. The “Ambassador of the United States of America”
> could then have been a cross-time traveler, except cross-time travel is
> impossible.

Looks like they pulled... a cross-time caper. B|

Drew "YEAAAAAAH" Perron