Questions about Visitor

[Alicorn]

An unusually strong food claim by someone other than the hand-feeder might persist. "Is mortal food" is not unusually strong; but if you go to somebody's garden, take their heirloom tomato they grew from a seed they got from last year's crop, and feed this tomato to your fairy vassal/master, the claim might go, and same deal with a berrybush.

[pedromvilar]

Hypothesis: humans are (indirectly) responsible for the existence of fairies.

Reasoning: Alicorn once described fairyland as, paraphrasing, "a layer of interesting between infinite expanses of boring." She also said that although fairyland goes on forever, there is a finite number of fairies, and new fairies are more likely to appear near other fairies. And it was mentioned that interesting things appear in previously boring places when they interact with other interesting things - the example I remember is that if someone dug deep enough into the ground it'd be all samey and boring, but after they left the place might grow magic glowing mushrooms or whatever due to the effect that'd have on the harmonics.

So, if everything interesting in fairyland happens because the harmonics are doing funny things, and they do funny things when interesting things do stuff, it could very well be the case that fairies (winged humanoids) started existing a while after a human accidentally got into (at the time terribly boring) fairyland via a naturally occurring tear. Their appearance there might've been enough interestingness in the world of boring to spark the first interesting things and eventually the appearance of actual fairies, thousands of years ago.

[Alicorn]

That is an interesting headcanon.

[Alicorn]

I have decided that since fairies do weird sound superpositions and could sound like e.g. multiple tonal languages simultaneously they can pretty trivially harmonize with themselves.

[Nemo]

Hypothesis: humans are (indirectly) responsible for the existence of fairies.

Reasoning: Alicorn once described fairyland as, paraphrasing, "a layer of interesting between infinite expanses of boring." She also said that although fairyland goes on forever, there is a finite number of fairies, and new fairies are more likely to appear near other fairies. And it was mentioned that interesting things appear in previously boring places when they interact with other interesting things - the example I remember is that if someone dug deep enough into the ground it'd be all samey and boring, but after they left the place might grow magic glowing mushrooms or whatever due to the effect that'd have on the harmonics.

So, if everything interesting in fairyland happens because the harmonics are doing funny things, and they do funny things when interesting things do stuff, it could very well be the case that fairies (winged humanoids) started existing a while after a human accidentally got into (at the time terribly boring) fairyland via a naturally occurring tear. Their appearance there might've been enough interestingness in the world of boring to spark the first interesting things and eventually the appearance of actual fairies, thousands of years ago.

Hasn't the Queen been around for a decent chunk of human history on her own? And there was already a preexisting fairy society at the time. That said I hope the timeline works, because this is awesome.

[DanielH]

The part of the idea I find awesome is that Fairlyland is caused by something from the mortal world which we mostly understand. It doesn’t need to be a human; any early hominid could have wandered in and affected harmonics to cause fairies, and the plants and stuff could have existed for much longer.

But this is getting to what Cat Max was wondering about with daeva: why do they look like humans when humans have only looked like humans for a few hundred thousand years? Did the shape of daeva come first, or did daeva only start appearing after humans evolved? Or is it really a coincidence on at least the causal level? The same questions apply to fairies.

[pedromvilar]

Well, a few hundred thousand years is a lot of time, and I'm pretty sure no fairy alive remembers that much lifetime; even if the Queen had been alive for all of human written history that's, what, 7 thousand years? If she were 70 thousand there'd still be another 130 thousand years to account for, there.

[pedromvilar]

From #quendi the other day:

19:06 < DeAnno> Oh! I had a question about Fairy things. If you have no name, can you name yourself mentally and have that stick as your first name?
19:06 <~Teceler> I think Alicorn said it had to be out loud?
19:06 <~Teceler> but otherwise you can name yourself yes
19:07 < Alicorn> teceler is right
19:07 < DeAnno> Does out loud include telepathy and writing and sign, or does it have to be sounds?
19:08 < Alicorn> Includes sign
19:08 < Alicorn> telepathy-substrated names are allowed in general so I guess you could be named that way
19:08 < Alicorn> undecided on writing
19:08 < DeAnno> Ok, that is interesting.
19:08 <~Teceler> hm?
19:09 < DeAnno> I was thinking about a character really good at shedding conditions, and wondering if it was practical to just shed the condition of having a name a lot to escape vassaldom.
19:14 <@kappabeta> Huh.
19:14 <@kappabeta> That would be interesting.
19:15 < DeAnno> It's a pretty edge case of his power, he would have to bend far to get there, but it'd be possible
19:15 < DeAnno> Itd be easier to shed the food thing I think, since he can easily ditch all his atoms
19:22 <@kappabeta> would ditching all his atoms help?
19:22 <@kappabeta> alicorn, do food claims persist without continuity of physical form?
19:22 < DeAnno> Spitting food out does, so it made sense?
19:22 < DeAnno> I guess I might misunderstand the mechanism
19:23 <@kappabeta> spitting food out works before the claim is established, i thought?
19:23 < Alicorn> I don't remember if I have ruled on that but food claims don't wear off when you've recycled your cells or anything
19:23 < Alicorn> kappa is right
19:23 < DeAnno> Interesting
19:23 <~Teceler> would resleeving break a foodclaim?
19:23 < DeAnno> So it wouldnt go away even if you could reproduce the food and give it back?
19:23 < Alicorn> idk what resleeving
19:23 <@kappabeta> resleeving: your mind be in a body; now it be in a upload; now it be in a different body
19:23 < Alicorn> a duplicate of the food does not count as returning it
19:24 < Alicorn> I might let that work or not depending on the plot needs of the box
19:24 < DeAnno> No, I mean, if it was the same food particle for particle arranged in the same way
19:24 < Alicorn> undecided on that

[DanielH]

A merely square-copied replacement food does not work, so presumably you would need it to be the same atoms (and if that does not always make sense in your world for quantum mechanical reasons I assume the food would need to have avoided all processes where the abstraction breaks down)

[Throne3d]

Does vassalization work on animals? Could a fairy vassalize and plain-speak-order an animal to do something? (I assume it wouldn't have great results, since animals are unlikely to carry out the orders super effectively, but theoretically.) Does plain-speak work on animals anyway?

When I asked about this in IRC, Teceler wondered about if a fairy could become vassalized to an animal by eating it (which I wouldn't expect, since I doubt animals can have vassals), which prompted me to wonder if eating a fairy eating a human would result in a food claim (or a human eating a fairy), seeing as a person presumably owns themselves, they sort-of count as food, and so if they're eaten it might result in a food claim? (And if you had a fairy who decided to eat a person, and this were the case, presumably this would result in them having to stop because they can't cause harm to their master.)

If this does result in a claim, how much… would be necessary? This could result in certain 'food claims' being made after certain activities between a fairy and a human, depending.

If a master's limb (or other body part) is detached/severed from their body, does the "can't harm your master" thing apply to this body part, such that a vassal would not be allowed to damage it? If yes, is this affected at all based on whether the body part was removed prior to the master envassaling the vassal? (Is there a difference between: arm chopped off, gets a vassal, vassal tries to attack arm; vs gets a vassal, arm chopped off, vassal tries to attack arm?)

I apologize for all the gruesome questions.

Edit: For clarification, I don't mean things like berrybushes. I mean, if someone tried to eat Promise's hand or some other fairy tried to eat some human's hand.