Daevinity Worldbuilding Info

[Alicorn]

You can pay daeva with pets (and in the cases of angels especially, houseplants), yes.

I was thinking of the antimatter as being principally useful for demons without any neighbors, who live off by themselves in the vacuum not near the plane of gold or any other major settlement.

[DanielH]

Plus, radiation shielding is bound to be good enough that you could avoid annoying neighbors and electronics.

I assume that daeva can’t bring people (humans or other daeva) when being (un)summoned, though? If a daeva has a pet, could they bring the pet on summons (assuming it wouldn’t violate a binding)?

[Alicorn]

Daeva can't bring other living things with them on being summoned.

[DanielH]

About how fast do the various daeva work? We’ve had estimates for huge projects (like the plane of gold) on the order of days or weeks, but the characters producing these estimates weren’t precise and probably didn’t bother being accurate, and large-scale numbers are harder for humans to work with anyway.

So far, we have that fairies can move as much stuff as they can keep in their minds arbitrarily fast, and that Cam can create a corridor from blueprints at about walking speed while dealing with air stuff. What if he’d not needed to deal with air, or knew what he wanted better than the blueprints? If he just wanted to stand there and fill an ocean with pure water, how fast could he do that? What about angels?

By the way, this is one of my favorite worlds that glowfic has introduced me to, and I keep wanting to read the source canon. I wish you’d written up Revelation’s story.

[Alicorn]

Demons are fastest. Angels can be pretty quick if they're doing something simple (turning something into a monoelemental substance or water or air or fluff) but slow down for complex tasks. Fairies are mostly limited by attention. A demon can pretty easily sustain enough air around themselves for comfort even in a pure vacuum while also doing other things. Simple or predesigned stuff is fastest. I don't have really hard numbers on this.

[DanielH]

There was some discussion of cryptography elsewhere, and now I’m wondering: how good is demon magic at information? Could it create a piece of paper with Promise’s real name on it (because that’s almost like making a book in a new format when he hasn’t read the original)? Could he make an audiobook version of a book that had never been recorded (if so, whose voice would it use; if not, would he be able to do it if told about text-to-speech software)? A print transcript of a podcast that had never had a script? A Russian translation of a book that had never been so translated (what if he’d never learned Russian?)? A piece of paper containing the number I’m thinking of? A number of beads equal to the positive integer between zero and ten I’m thinking of? I assume he could do some other Bell’s notebooks; could he do them decrypted for the Bells who write in a code they can read and never wrote down the cypher for? Obviously he can’t decrypt the ones that are only processing and lose their meaning after 10 minites even to the Bell who wrote them.

Unrelated to information, could a demon make an African Grey egg, or a kitten sapling, or anything else that isn’t yet smarter than a snail but will become so/produce something that is if things take their natural course?

[Alicorn]

Promise's name has never been spoken aloud or written down, so there's nothing for a demon to generate that has her name. Demons cannot make records of things that were not recorded. They do not have pastwatching. They could make a computer that had both the text of a book and text-to-speech software on it but the computer has to actually perform the translation at some point before the audiobook can be generated. Translation, same problem. Not the number you're thinking of, in paper or bead form. He could do other Bells' notebooks but cannot decrypt the ciphered ones.

Eggs do in fact work just fine, so Hell has more birds and reptiles than mammals. If they knew about kitten trees they could make kitten saplings.

[DanielH]

I’m a bit confused about the inconsistency of “can make a searchable PDF” but “canmot make an audiobook”; is it because the book itself “counts” as text form, but new information about inflections and pauses would need to be generated for text-to-speech? I’m guessing that would mean a demon would also need to make a computer to do transcription, but that probably works better in 2159 than 2014.

I’m not sure what I said that made you think of pastwatching, but could a demon use their abilities as a camera to make photos of things they’re looking at (if we assume they have good vision and pretend human vision is actually as consistently good as our brains pretend) or imagining in sufficient detail?

I know no demons know about kitten trees yet, but there are two daeva in Vorkosigan worlds, and I think Miles was still at the same bio conference (although I don’t know if kitten trees are canon, as I haven’t read it).

Wait, with how precise angels need to be, is Heaven devoid of food? I probably wouldn’t mind not eating and being mildly hungry all the time, but it would drive some people crazy. I guess summoners can pay in seeds and soil, and you said animals can be brought back from Earth…

[Alicorn]

The book itself counts as text; the information about what the text is and how many pages it is on and so on exists already.

Demons can produce pictures of mental imagery pretty damn well without needing art skills because they're just making the picture directly. This can be adapted to produce renderings of things they're looking at, but they won't be photographically accurate.

Kitten trees are canon. The relevant continuities could in theory involve demons making kitten trees.

Substances with which an angel is really familiar, like foods they've tried, are pretty easy to make. Adana can turn cloud fluff into a sandwich. There is nonzero agriculture in Heaven, of course. And "make thing bigger with this raw material" is a fairly simple angel skill too.

[DanielH]

Oh, ok. The discussion above about true-breeding changes to plants made me think angel magic in general was harder; I guess it makes sense that that specific change would be fairly difficult.