Daevinity Worldbuilding Info

[Alicorn]

Daeva and summoners may agree to change the terms of their deal. This means in practice that you can't guarantee that a demon has been honest with you: if you make a deal that you will give a fairy a cookie in exchange for answering a question honestly, and then the fairy answers your question, the possibilities are a) the fairy has lied, b) the fairy has told the truth. If (a), you don't have any magical lie-detecting powers; your choices are to hand over the cookie and dismiss the fairy (implicitly agreeing that you got what you paid for), or hold onto the cookie and watch the fairy get pissed off at you. The only thing that changes if the fairy has given you what you paid for and you refuse to hand over its cookie and send it home is that now the fairy can hurt you. If it wants. So basically you can only verify daeva honesty if you're willing to work with violent, possibly murderous, yet in fact honest (and not misleading) daeva and get beat up for your cookies. Honest nonviolent daeva can't prove it (they can just sort of go "come on, dude, give me the cookie and lemme go home") and dishonest daeva don't have to give that fact away (they can act like nonviolent honest daeva).

It's not unheard of for daeva to kill their summoners, although it's not very popular (it's the sort of thing you bind against, and the sort of thing that a daeva who doesn't want to go home yet will conscientiously avoid). It is not part of the idea of giving a demon your soul.

Ambiguous deals depend considerably on the language used. The thing you gave the demon constitutes a list of recently-published books. (Demons in particular, since they're often gagged, learn to reject vague deals that could short them.) The food the demon made you constitutes "lunch" even if it isn't your typical lunch (summoners, when they are studying, learn to make precise requests).

[DanielH]

Couldn’t you tell the fairy, “Give me a minute to get the cookie”, spend the minute trying to dismiss the fairy, and see if they disappear? If they lied, they did not fulfill their end of the deal and can be dismissed for the same reason they can’t get violent. If they told the truth, then you come back a minute later, find the fairy there to accept a cookie, give them a cookie, and dismiss them. Is there some reason this wouldn’t work? Also, I am surprised you cam’t bind honesty somehow.

Wait, now I’m thinking of ways to exploit this to solve unsolved problems. Create a task for a daeva to do something, with one sort of payment if P = NP, anothe if P ≠ NP, and a third if this is orthogonal to the standard axioms. Then try to pay them with each thing in turn until you cam dismiss them.

I have a feeling that neither of these would work, but I don’t know why not. I am using two assumptions from this thread’s original post: 1. “Summoners cannot get rid of daeva who have completed their tasks and have not been paid.”, from which I am also inferring that they can get rid of daeva who have yet to complete their tasks (which I thought you explicitly said but cannot find), and 2. “The parameters of task, payment, or both may be edited after agreement as long as both summoner and daeva agree.”, although when looking for that quote I saw something implying a daeva could unilaterally accept a smaller paymentnin order to go home sooner.

[Alicorn]

The first thing is clever and I didn't think of it but I'm not sure I desire its implications. I will have to think of something, or maybe Aestrix will have a notion.

The P = NP thing straightforwardly does not work in that it does not constitute the sort of deal that a daeva can agree to.

It's not so much that a daeva can unilaterally accept a smaller payment. If for some reason the summoner doesn't want to agree that a smaller payment will occur, they don't have to. There's just no incentive.

[DanielH]

Something else I came up with that didn’t fit in the previous post is that Cam was canonically summoned by a linguistics department to confirm information. Did they have to use a specially-designed gag order that was relaxed enough to allow communication of task-relevant information, or does the standard one somehow work?

[Alicorn]

He could point at things. (There was a separate ungagged demon involved; Cam was not so lucky.)

[DanielH]

I realized he couldn’t have been the only, or even primary, demon; he was summoned to confirm things. I hadn’t thought about pointing, though.

A lot of the sandboxes have Cam say something about not teaching gagging. Is it difficult to figure out from a textbook on bindings minus the gagging chapter how to gag daeva, or is this in the realm of “let’s not give summoners ideas about mean things they could do to daeva”? Also, Cam said at some point that you should work in your native language, not copy examples out of the book; if it’s a complete example and you don’t change anything, would the latter actually cause problems?

[Alicorn]

Gagging is a complicated but relatively safe to experiment with elaboration on conventional bindings. When Cam originally publicized daeva he left it out, but other summoners came out of the woodwork after his death to disclose the information. It would be time-consuming to reinvent and you'd have to think of it.

You're less likely to notice spelling errors &c when it's not your native language, but otherwise it would be fine to copy a nonnative circle.

[DanielH]

It was earlier asked why Hell’s plane of gold didn’t collapse into a sphere of gold, to which you replied that it was because you were bad at physics. Later, some glowfic gave me the idea that the entire plane was a demon BEING the plane and using daeva body magic to maintain shape (maybe it’s not solid gold and has nerves, hair cells, retina cells, etc. and the demon is spying on everybody); just while writing this, I had the idea of the plane rotating rather quickly and thus staying a disk of gold, although I don’t know how well that would actually work or if it would make people noticeably dizzy (though, being daeva, they wouldn’t be incapacitatingly so). I can also think of other ways to keep it flat using demon magic if it can’t be stable using conventional physics; they are, after all, able to produce infinite energy and can thus keep the plane fighting its gravity forever. In any case, it seems like there are plausible ways for a demon eccentric enough to make a plane of gold with 16 times Earth’s surface area to also make it stay a plane.

Given that, however it happens, there is a plane of gold in Hell, I was wondering if the first two minutes of this video might apply (he later wanders far off-topic, as he usually does, but the first two minutes seem relevant). I was also wondering if Heaven just had no gravity, given approximately infinite uniform mass in all directions, or if it has magical flat gravity like Fairyland and Limbo.

[Alicorn]

A demon being the plane of gold is a cute idea but it's not what I had in mind.

I try to avoid videos most of the time.

Heaven has magical flat gravity in a direction, like Fairyland and Limbo.

[DanielH]

I should have remembered you avoided videos. Basically, it shows that as you get farther from the center, gravity tilts slightlyy, so that by the time you get to the edge, you’re more climbing a cliff than taking a walk. Then you can step over the edge and when you get halfway down gravity is pointing perpendicular to the surface again. When you’re relatively close to the center, or if you build your own gravity well, this shouldn’t be an issue. Otherwise, it would mainly cause odd architecture whoch is not-quite-perpendicular to the plane of gold.