Questions about Visitor

[Alicorn]

I would let metaravelry affect sorcery.

Gem... hm. Yes, because post-rewind the fairy would not know her name, and her body would not contain or have ever contained the food.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

That makes it sound like, if Gem gets caught, the most expedient, and perhaps the only possible depending on the cleverness of the fairy in question, method of escape might be to kill herself.

A bit creepy to think about.

[DanielH]

That would not be an easy method of escape if the fairy who caught her knew much about mortals; I imagine that anti-suicide would be a standard order.

[Alicorn]

That might not work on Gem if Gem knew to expect to survive her physical death, depending on exact wording.

[DanielH]

Now there is a gatepair above the Confluence of a Thousand Rivers. (There are actually only eight hundred ninety four even if you count the little streams. That's just what it's called.)

That’s what it’s called in English. Other human languages use other large numbers than English the way “thousand” is used there. Would somebody speaking those languages then hear a number other than a thousand?

[Alicorn]

Fairies use base ten and a thousand is the nearest round number to eight hundred and ninety four.

[DanielH]

So people who used languages designed for other bases (or use large non-round numbers like a dozen or a great gross) wouldn’t hear other numbers? That’s not how I expected plain speaking translation to work, but I suppose perfect translation is impossible even in theory.

[Alicorn]

No one will hear other numbers. Fairies may sometimes use other bases, but base ten is totally among the used bases and whoever named the Confluence was using that one and named it after a real number which is round in that base. It is translated numerically correctly from there.

[DanielH]

If Richard told a fairy, “My name is similar to the word ‘Richly’”, would the fairy be able to pull the “-ly” from that word in order to find the common syllable “Rich”? It seems reasonably likely that they could, but at the same time it seems like plain speaking might prevent them from this kind of syllable-level access to the word.

This question was originally inspired by Cherish’s original name being Cherie, but the pronunciation is slightly different in that case so it doesn’t actually work out.

[Nemo]

If the fairy is thinking about "this person's name" and "Richly" together, it'll click because of the shared syllable. In particular, this Cherish's name is Kelsey specifically so this doesn't happen. (Her unchanged name, which isn't Cherie because of a different backstory, was apparently close enough that some people consider it to share a syllable. This way we can avoid worrying about how her parents pronounced it.)