What Might Have Been: Incandescence

[Alicorn]

We are going to write some more Cycle.

THIS IS NOT A RESURRECTION OF INCANDESCENCE IN GENERAL. We are not going to write tons of Cycle, we might just do dreams and little to no Sylvi & Avedan, you should not expect them to peal, etc. There are just a few scenes we want to do that Aestrix can prod her brain into doing, and no good reason to tuck them away in a sandbox so as to confuse anyone reading Incandescence from the index into thinking they don't exist.

But yeah, Cycle, little bit more of that.

[DanielH]

Yes! Zombie incandescence!

Okay, now I’m imagining standard zombies getting such a high temperature that they are literally glowing and setting nearby things on fire. Maybe I should have used a different metaphor.

[Aestrix]

Ah yes. The zombies are now on fire.

That helps.

[DanielH]

Why does the plan of “kill and resurrect the boot that is Phix” not work? Does it not occur to anybody, do they not try it, does she come back as a boot, or what?

[Alicorn]

It's sort of hard to kill a boot. They could try various means of destroying it, but things that come out of magics are often pretty durable and they don't know if her selfness might stay attached to a bit of it or something, and also she might or might not be able to feel the process.

[Aestrix]

Also Darren's head is filled with screaming at the thought.

[DanielH]

I guess the killing magic they have is intended for more conventionally living things, but that was my first thought. I expect that if they had a known-painless way of killing her to try it Darren wouldn’t let the internal screaming stop them, just like Ice didn’t stop fixing Cypress.

I’m having a hard time imagining the alethiometer failing to eventually provide useful information about whether she can still see, unless they decided it wasn’t worth bringing her to Chamomile yet. Had you worked out the failure mode in more detail?

[Alicorn]

The alethiometer could maybe tell, but while Phix getting a daemon wouldn't be nearly as much of a disaster as Phix being a boot, the possible and totally unknown interactions of daemons with Phix already being a boot would be enough to make them delay and hope another world would hold the solution (as indeed one would have done).