Questions about Visitor

[DanielH]

I was looking at old posts in this thread when I ran across this:

Yes, a super crushed sparrow will respawn as a fairy-shaped fairy.

It still seems aesthetically appropriate to me that Ruin can kill fairies dead and Leviathan can't.

I don't expect respawning to be a going concern in most sandboxes but I like this version.

AFAIK, Promise does not know about respawning, just that being crushed into a paste is not permanent. What about Thorn? He suggested the safest thing to do with them would be turning them into a sparrow; does he not know he can undo that without trying find an unguarded open gate to break the spell?

[Alicorn]

Thorn doesn't know that.

[DanielH]

Could fairies understand Morse code? Tap code? To me those seem like encodings of English for additional media, like writing and speaking are different forms of the same language, not like an additional cipher, but I could see it going either way.

[Alicorn]

I think they don't understand these.

[DanielH]

Fairies do not like animal protein. Where on the spectrum between tofu, through impossible burgers and Nexus vat meat, and an actual hamburger do they start having problems?

[Alicorn]

It's "don't like" not "are harmed by" so this line will vary fairy by fairy.

[DanielH]

If a fairy watches somebody write out orders, and then tells the writer their name, and then reads the orders, would that count? If everybody in a room knows a fairy’s name, and the fairy turns around, somebody writes out orders, and the fairy reads them, does that count?

If there were a giant advertising campaign showing Bree’s face and saying “This person is named Eliliand”, would she have trouble watching live events with product placement, or would that not be a problem for some reason?

Can fairie recognize people’s voices or handwriting?

[Alicorn]

No and no.

Even live events have a brief delay. I'm not sure if I've ruled on genuinely realtime video feeds - no wait yes I have Promise did it to Dragon - that works. Imperatives in advertisements are seldom of the sort that would come out enforced, though.

Yes.

[DanielH]

If a fairy gives me an order, conveying concepts which I don’t have in my language, am I bound by the words I hear or the concepts they intend to convey?

For example, we in English don’t have words specifically for biological family or adopted family. If a fairy wants an anglophone to describe their biological family, the mortal’ll probably hear “Tell me about your family”. If they think of their adopted family when hearing tha phrase, do they have to describe their biological family, their adopted family, or both?

I’m wondering because it seems fairies can convey to each other more information per word than they could possibly convey to mortals, but they still discuss finding exact wordings for orders.

[Alicorn]

Both.

As always, the actual phenomenon going on here is "I write in English for an English-speaking audience and all translation is convention".