Grrl Power #456 – Supernatural police brutality
Basically Ingsol is saying that if you’re planning on enslaving humanity or something else dramatic that will blow the show for everyone else, like trying to wipe out another Council race in a loud and bloody war, either get it done before the Council finds out or, well, die. Possibly you’ll go to supernatural Sing Sing, but if the Council has to mobilize forces against you, it won’t end well.
That’s why there is an uncommon civility among the representatives. The biggest troublemakers over the centuries have been dealt with, or at least they manage to keep their murderous biases to themselves. That isn’t to say there aren’t disagreements and shouting matches at meetings, or even violence outside of the meetings, but they know if anything happens on a scale that taxes the Veil’s ability to conceal their activity from humans, the council will shut them down with extreme prejudice. Newly made supernaturals, in the case of Vampires or any other propagating race are given “The Speech,” something actually rather similar to what Maxima said at the press conference. “You’re a Vampire now, congratulations. I know you feel like a big bad ass, and compared to your average human you mostly are, but believe me, there are bigger and badder things out there, including other vampires who have centuries of feeding and experience on you, and they can and will kick the shit out of you if you go try and feed on some anchor during the 6:00 o’clock news, so mind your P’s and Q’s.”
That would sort of suck, becoming a vampire with all those amazing powers, mwoo hah hah! But then finding out you’re just at the bottom of a whole new food chain. I guess that’s kind of the point of a whole lot of supernatural fiction… except for the kind that involves the newbie being “the one” cause their great great grandfather was a mummy and their grandmother was Demeter’s niece and their roommate got a blood transfusion from a cloned dinosaur or whatever.
I’m not sure if I’ve broken some rule of good sequential art storytelling by having the three in the gallery jump in to the conversation like that, but then again maybe I’m too used to the Sydney meet and greet method of introducing characters. Sometimes people jump into a conversation before she gets to spend two pages grilling them. Anyway they’re proper character we’ll meet later, I didn’t just stick them in to nudge the conversation in the direction I wanted.
So sigils. The word sigil, it turns out it means… you know the fancy pentagram people draw when showing a spell, plus all the runes and designs? Apparently that is a sigil. Probably not a big surprise to most of you, but I always thought a sigil was a building. I’m not sure why, maybe cause it sounds like vigil, and someone in a watchtower is vigilant, or at least should be. I don’t know. Anyway, in my story they’re that fancy spell design stuff, and a kind of building, or at least a part of a building. Which I’m sure can be confusing to the people who maintain them, because the Sigils are covered in… well, not sigils, but runes. Still, you can’t see the floor in panel 4, but I bet there’s a big fancy sigil on the floor around the base of that pillar.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon as soon as I get up. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)
Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.
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Leading to a lot of story lines….
Oh, so it’s the veil, not the masquerade. Neat.
Like any good piece of world building, this answers some questions, and opens up about a dozen more.
Are the aliens newcomers to the scene, or like the angels and demons they’ve been around long enough to help make it? Speaking of which, is the earth the center for heaven/hell relations, or is this the equivalent of some tropical resort they come to on their days off, and they stress the importance to the natives to make them feel better? Are their regional territories, or with globalization are they shifting to the thought process of global travel?
And finally, was the war long enough in the past that some parties are itching for another fight?
Oh, and I love that Halo recognized instantly how this would help people preying on humans, nice touch.
The demons are aliens. And some, like the succubi, have had intercourse with humans for a long time. Presumably the angels will be too. But not necessarily. They might have completely different origins, yet have a desire to interfere both in the plans of humans and of demons.
The succubi have had intercourse with humans indeed. “Puts on monocle”. Hmm….
You did that on purpose!
Well, one wouldn’t expect them to have outercourse with them, now would one?
In the case of aliens (of the extra-terrestrial kind), you could have outercourse with them…In actual outer space, no less. Indeed, you could even join the “1 Million Mile High Club.”
;)
Why would the aliens be newcommers?
We humans became “recently aware” of the concept of extraterestials (that are not from another dimension), but they have been around for ages. Propably “longer then your sun burned hot”.
There have been depictions of strange flying craft in manuscripts and on walls for hundreds and thousands of years
“probably longer than your sun burned hot”
they couldn’t have been on earth THAT long… since i don’t think the earth itself has been around THAT long.
Not on the Earth, but ‘around’.
The gist being that their civilisation has been around since before our Sun ignited, as opposed to being on Earth that long. Which would be a mighty long time, and would require galactic civilisation to have started fairly early in the Milky Way’s life. But that is not unreasonable, given that we are out in the sticks, on a spiral arm.
Things have probably been very busy, towards the centre, for a long time. Just look at all those Dyson spheres… well you can’t actually see one, unless you catch it under construction… but if civilisation is widespread, throughout our, and other, galaxies, then it would be throwing our astronomer’s observations out. There would be more mass, in each galaxy, than they could observe by just counting up all the suns.
”Earth is a pimple on the stick-out ears of our backwoods hick of a galaxy.” -some guy whose name I forget.
The carbon that carbon based life requires is all supernova ashes. There weren’t a lot of suitable planets around 5 billion years ago, and while most of those would have been towards the galactic core I have seen calculations suggesting that in order for life to survive over the long term there they would have to go from sterile planet to civilization capable of building a planetary shield in just a couple hundred million years due to the higher frequency of nearby supernova.
“from sterile planet to civilization capable of building a planetary shield ”
Or to a civilization of Gnomes?
a) they don’t have to have come from our galaxy.
b) all they have to do is get to the stage where they are capable of creating a colony that can survive the loss of it’s “parent” planet- theoretically, even if it knocks them back to the equivalent of the Middle Ages (NOT the Stone Age. the Middle Ages were caused by the functional complete collapse of civilisation as it was known at the time, so it’s fair to say it’s impossible to be knocked back further.) they could recover from there- which is a LOT quicker than from life first evolving.
c) current estimates put the milky way at roughly the age of the universe. there’s been plenty of times for multiple attempts.
In a manner of speaking, it could be said that the “Masquerade” is the protocol (ie: culling of troublemakers, in order to stay hidden) they put into effect to make sure that the Veil isn’t compromised. Particularly, vampires have to exercise “population control” because if there’s too many vampires feeding among the population, the chances of discovery are increased. According to V:tM, about 1 vampire per 100,000 humans is a good ratio to allow vampires to feed (& not starve) & still maintain enough stealth. Of course, new vampires (especially those that actually kill to feed, instead of using stealth or seduction, will also be instructed to at least “clean up after themselves,” disposing of the body in a way that it won’t be discovered until long after the fact, making “Cause of Death” difficult/impossible to determine.
;)
Why do you think the human population has been allowed to reach it’s current level? Far out-reaching current resources? It’s like when farmers start breeding more and more bovines
“far out-reaching current resources”
That’s a joke, right?
Every human being in the world could live in TEXAS in family homes on a 1/10 acre plot, with the rest of the world available for farming.
And it wouldn’t take the rest of the world. It could probably be done entirely in the US (which already produces a huge surplus) – well, the US and Canada.
So, yeah, we’re SO far beyond the capability of the world that we could all fit in less than one continent, including our food needs.
Sorry, but propaganda really makes me angry.
We need most of that space to maintain a certain level of social order, and to isolate diseases within the population.
When I was born, we lived in a world where there was enough food produced worldwide that everybody could be fed. With starvation being down to various social problems, which inhibited the distribution of that food. Such as wars and civil wars, which would both destroy local infrastructure and isolate much of the populace from potential aid.
Within the last few years we have transitioned to the point where there is not enough food being produced to feed everybody. In addition to still having huge waste in the system, where a lot of food perishes before reaching the consumer.
This is only going to get worse, if the status quo is maintained. Trouble is that an increase in extreme weather conditions, due to global warming, is going to worsen the situation. As will the wars over increasingly scarce resources, such as good farming land and the water to supply it. Both of which will lead to more displaced refugees, who will be unable to produce food of their own.
So, with an ever-expanding world population, we are driving ourselves into a corner. Where we will be forced to rely on GM crops and eating more bugs, as a part of our diet.
Of course there are various schemes to try and turn this around. Such as using water desalinisation, in order to convert presently arid land into good farming land. But until, or unless, we see such schemes on a massive scale, the demand will continue to outstrip supply. In this case, that economic phrase means ‘a lot of people will be starving’.
There is a big disconnect between ‘theoretical food production capacity’ and ‘people being fed’. I base this not on propaganda, but the conclusions reached by the UN, and similarly prestigious bodies, when looking at long-term global needs (working on a scale of decades into the future, rather than just the present day situation).
Pretty much all crops are “GM crops”. And that’s just one of the things I take issue with in your reply Yorp but I have neither the spoons nor the brain cycles to point them out without sounding like a conspiracy nut.
I have statistics. Roughly 93% of all crops are already GMO, at least in the U.S. 92% of corn, 94% of soybeans, etc. Around 75% of all prepared foods have at least one GM ingredient. This is just my opinion, but I think the concern about GMO crops is seriously overblown.
There IS enough food being produced to feed everybody. The problem is that a lot of it gets wasted. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that as much as a third of all food produced (worldwide) is wasted.
I know that in the U.S., roughly 25% of all produce (fruits and vegetables) gets wasted simply because it’s “ugly”. Sometimes it’s got a bruise. Sometimes it’s misshapen (e.g. two carrots twisted together). Sometimes it’s got minor cosmetic defects, such as brown scoring on squash because of a windstorm. Sometimes it’s just slightly bigger or smaller than average. This equates to about 20 billion pounds a year wasted before it even gets to the store, in the U.S. alone, simply because large supermarket chains dictate exactly how their fruit and veggies should look. If produce fails to make the grade for size, shape, or color it’s deemed “ugly” and unsellable. It’s perfectly healthy, perfectly edible, and so what if it’s got a funny shape? You can’t tell, once it’s been chopped up and put in a stew. There’s no need to waste it.
It isn’t until within the last 2 or 3 years, as public awareness has risen, that large supermarket chains have started to stock “ugly produce”. Supermarkets such as Giant Eagle in Pennsylvania and Ohio, Hannaford in New York, Whole Foods Market in California and New York, and home delivery services such as Perfectly Imperfect, Imperfect Produce, and Hungry Harvest.
Globally, about one-third of food is wasted: 1.6 billion tonnes of produce a year, with a value of about $1 trillion. If this wasted food were stacked in 20-cubic meter skips, it would fill 80 million of them, enough to reach all the way to the moon, and encircle it once.
While yes, people are all too afraid of GM food, is it really any surprise? The average person knows next to nothing about how the alterations to crops affect them and their effects on the human body. People need to be more informed if we want them to accept it.
Also, bruised bananas are only good for milkshakes and banana bread. Maybe curry. Bruising is not a strictly cosmetic concern like the others you mentioned as it certainly can change flavour.
Perhaps, but the supermarket chains have been known to go through an entire $8,000 shipment of lettuce, find one bruised head, and send the entire shipment back. In other words, they’re throwing out $7,999 of lettuce because one head was less than perfect. But the farmers don’t dare complain, or the chain might never do business with him again.
And you can cut around the bruise. It doesn’t ruin the whole fruit or vegetable.
Europeans are generally very well informed on the topic. Which is why we are not keen on them! Here are a few of my personal reasons for disliking becoming dependant on them:
A) Our greatest defence against disease and infestation is genetic diversity, GM crops work massively contrary to this. The Irish Potato Famine occurred because the country was heavily dependent on one food type and there was insufficient genetic diversity, amongst the varieties they had, to ensure that only a portion of the harvest was destroyed.
Whilst there were many fatalities, there was another alternative available. Many Irish emigrated, to other countries, which were not dependant on potatoes. Thus allowing those emigres to survive.
But what happens when this occurs to a GM crop, in a world where it has been taken up aground the globe? Every country, which favours that type of food, will also be suffering from the same blight. There will be nowhere to flee to!
Do not think that just because we have designed crops to be disease-resistant, that it means they are immune.
B) Most countries are not testing their GM crops adequately or safely. This is the stage when we are most likely to find a crop with a serious flaw. Yet, by the time it is identified, the crop has already contaminated the surrounding countryside, and is spreading without human intervention.
This is a serious problem for organic farmers, for example, who are trying to offer GM free alternatives. Because they are getting contamination, from others who are using GM crops, despite not planting any themselves. We are much more likely to mess up, by our inept genetic tinkering, than by cross-breeding existing varieties. We are bypassing natures protection.
C) Big conglomerates are attempting to make farmers in poor countries dependent on their GM product, and the extras that go with it. For instance a custom brand of fertiliser, designed to compliment the crop. And fighting any attempt to use generic alternatives (and/or ensuring that they will be significantly less effective for the GM crop in question). With the aim of maximising the company’s profits, through dependency, but, as a side-effect, making whole countries rely on that company’s products.
I do not like being forced into these corners.
That is purely in America. Europe has been a lot more cautious.
Which is good, because if it turns out that one of those GM crops turns out to have, let us say Thalidomide-like side effects, which only show in the third generation, it will take a long time to make that association. But there will be a big clue that it is only occurring in America, and not in Europe.
Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but remember that the guys who engineer these crops eat them too. I tend to think they’re tested at least well enough to not give the people who created them irreversible organ failure, know what I mean? :)
But I concede points (A) and (C) in your previous post.
Actually, I concede (A), (B), and (C). I just am less worried about a GM crop that “turns out to have Thalidomide-like side effects” than most people.
I am more concerned about the way human and other animal genes are spliced into food plants, not so much over concerns of cannibalism, as the possibility that those genes may enable herd diseases to be spread to the general population. Can you imagine if you could catch herpes, influenza, or hepatitis fro eating raw vegetables?
Fair point. With what I know about genetics, I can say it’s highly unlikely… but I don’t know enough to say it’s impossible!
> That is purely in America. Europe has been a lot more cautious.
I was about to say that.
Also:
D) Some people are allergic against certain food, say for example peanuts. Now, AFAIU, GM isn’t all about creating genes from thin air, instead, genes that cause certain plants to be resistant towards (for example) a certain disease are “added” to other, completely different plants in order to give them the same resistance. Now, if you bring peanut genes into a tomato plant to make it resistant against a disease, you may create the problem that those people who are allergic against peanuts are now also allergic against these GM tomatoes, at least potentially. They would never expect it since peanuts and tomatoes never interbreed…
Unlikely. All allergies are due to the presence of certain large proteins. The structure of these proteins that cause these allergies are well known. As long as they take care that their GM tomatoes don’t contain the same allergy-causing proteins as peanuts (which are not nuts, btw; botanically, they’re in the legume family), then your suggestion will never come to pass.
It is more likely (and even then, not much more likely) that they will accidentally cause a hitherto unknown protein to express itself, that just coincidentally happens to cause allergies in susceptible patients.
In every generation we have heard scientists and medical people saying “trust me, I am a scientist” or “trust me I am a doctor” and “I can authoritatively say the following, and it is correct.” Whilst talking a load of bollox, as proven by later generations of scientists and medical people.
What makes you think that your assurances have any greater validity?
PS. rather drunk, so just talking generally Love ya MSpears, nothing personal.
Wouldn’t they just can/juice a misshapen vegetable? Things don’t need to be in the produce aisle to be food.
Things that can’t be sold tend to make good fertilizer.
That’s what I keep saying. So what if the vegetable was misshapen? You can’t tell once it’s juice! (Or cut up and used in a stew, or turned into a sauce, or whatever.) But in many cases, the misshapen veggies are just left in the field to rot.
See my comment about misshapen produce being left in the field to rot, or not even picked… just left on the vine to avoid the expense of harvesting something the stores won’t buy. Farmers that have pigs or cattle sometimes use it for animal feed. The pigs and cows don’t care if their food is funny-looking (and neither should we, IMO).
I expect things to change as public awareness rises. Already more than 200 food banks get a substantial amount of unsellable produce from growers, retailers and food processors, especially after legislation was passed that grants tax incentives for companies and farmers to donate food. Our local school district (which has not outsourced its cafeteria operations) uses ugly produce from local farmers in dishes like mashed potatoes, or desserts such as apple cobbler. So far, the kids haven’t been able to tell the difference. :)
That’s the beauty of living on a producing country, we purchase really cheap fruits and vegetables (also meat, delicious meat). Most fruits or vegetables will have ‘defects’ per american standards, and they are perfectly edible and tasty.
Much of this is already changing. Check out the Modern Marvels episode on agriculture (I think it’s called “Harvest”) and you’ll see a processing plant where peaches are being sorted by size and color. Those that don’t make the cut are not thrown away, they’re used in other processes. And something similar was done on the “Egg” episode. On the retail level, Walmart has a “slop bucket”, where damaged or unsellable food is collected for sale to a composter.
On the other hand, sugarbeet farmers around here are famous for leaving beets to rot in the ground. One would think they would market anything they couldn’t sell to the nearby ethanol plants, but no… Which sounds like a good enough reason to end the sugar subsidies. No sense in paying them to be wasteful.
Individual experiments and initiatives are good, but they do not change things even at a national level, let alone a world one. So I was pleased this year when France passed a law which required super-markets (and similar retailers) to ensure their out of date produce was put to good use. Donated to charity food banks and the like.
This made a profound impact on reducing their national waste figures. Something that I hope gets taken up around the world.
Technically, all food has been Genetically Modified (or Manipulated) in some way, the only difference now is they are being Modified quicker
That juicy orange carrot you like snacking on? GM’ed by the Dutch, originally carrots were purple or white (like parsnips), but the Dutch Royal colour is orange, and they liked their carrots so much they ‘modified’ them into that colour
Yup, but they were modified by cross-breeding. So just doing what nature does, but speeding up the process by making choices, rather than rely on random results.
What we do nowadays completely bypasses the way nature has handled things, since life started. “Lets put that plant’s genes into this plant here” snip snip. “Wouldn’t it be good to have fish anti-freeze in our vegetables? ” snip snip. “Uhh, we haven’t finished our studies on…”
“Doesn’t matter we were able to do it. And look we can also make them glow, in the dark! Whee!”
Don’t get me wrong, some of the uses will profoundly improve our lives. But the scope for errors, on a catastrophic scale, also goes up. Just look at how badly we messed up breeding African Bees with honey bees, in South America. Yet that was by using the traditional techniques. These new ones make it really easy to FUBAR.
Not to mention the domestic banana. Remember about a decade ago, when Kirk Cameron “found God”, and he and a guy named Ray Comfort made a video using a banana as an example of Intelligent Design?
Among other things, Ray talked about its “ease of use” (shaped to fit into the human hand; it comes with a protective, non-slip surface to hold, which is also biodegradable and sits “gracefully” over the human hand; it is curved towards the face for ease of consumption and does not squirt in one’s face during the act; there is a “pull tab” at the “top” for easy access; and it has a simple colour code to show ripeness: Green; too early. Yellow; just right. Black; too late.)
Well, first of all, if God intended for our food to be “easy access”, explain coconuts or pineapples. Why didn’t God “place a tab at the top” of oranges, grapefruit, lemons, or limes? Why didn’t he put pull tabs on hard-to-open foods like coconuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, etc.?
Second, it’s not really the banana that has a non-slip surface, it is the hand and specifically the skin, which has similar contact friction properties to rubber. The human hand is also adapted to hold just about any kind of object, which is why most everyday objects could be classified as “non-slip”, whether they’re designed to be or not.
Third, bananas, unlike citrus fruits, are fairly solid on the inside. It’s unlikely that you would need a pull tab to keep it from squirting you in the face. Come to think of it, why would Ray think that a banana would squirt in his face? Maybe because it’s shaped vaguely like a penis?
And most importantly, if the banana was proof of “intelligent design by God”, I would laugh at God’s design skills. What we think of as a banana is quite different from its wild predecessors – specifically, it’s a seedless triploid, an asexual clone bred through manually-cut side-shoots of the parent corm, including a stem and some roots. It is only through human cultivation that it has managed to survive this long, because it is completely incapable of natural, sexual propagation, leading to a genetic bottleneck that makes it vulnerable to having the entire crop wiped out by disease… which in fact has already happened back in the 60s, when the Gros Michel variety was wiped out by Panama disease. (The ones we eat today are mostly the Cavendish variety.)
The wild banana, the predecessor of the cultivated fruit favourite, does reproduce sexually, pollinating their flowers in the usual way and having the botanical equivalent of sex. These wild bananas are small, dry cacao-pod-looking things loaded with inedible seeds and hard flesh.
Something that Ray fails to mention is that bananas only grow between 30 degrees north latitude and 30 degrees south latitude. In fact, many cultures outside of the tropics never saw a banana until well into the twentieth century. Even today, many people have never seen a banana — Jesus certainly wouldn’t have! So, if bananas are really such perfect examples of God’s handiwork, if they are such a perfect food for humans, then why do they only grow in the tropics where so many people have no easy access to them? Why do some people have potentially fatal allergic reactions to them? If they were the “perfect” food, presumably everyone would want (and be able to) eat them.
So, yes, the banana is proof of “intelligent design” — by humans.
“Within the last few years we have transitioned to the point where there is not enough food being produced to feed everybody”
Globally? Not true.
Word Food Programme.
1 – Is there a food shortage in the world?
There is enough food in the world today for everyone to have the nourishment necessary for a healthy and productive life.
https://www.wfp.org/hunger/faqs
It’s keeps being a matter of distribution.
1 – Is there a food shortage in the world?
There is enough food in the world today for everyone to have the nourishment necessary for a healthy and productive life.
https://www.wfp.org/hunger/faqs
That would be like collecting all food that is produced anywhere in the world and then distribute it equally to every human being in amounts “necessary for a healthy and productive life”. So doing it like this would provide the minimum level of food “necessary for a healthy and productive life”, which would not sufficient for westerners. So it’s not even just a distribution problem, even if perfectly distributed it would just be the minimum.
On top of that, producing food requires effort in terms of money and work, that’s why food is not given away for free to everybody, most people have to pay for it. Those who can’t produce their own food and cannot buy food from others are going to hunger, even where food would be available. On top ofthat the distribution of food requires effort in terms of money and work, too, and makes the food even more expensive when it arrives at the destination.
tl;dr: It’s not simply a matter of distribution. Distribution is one factor.
I totally concur with you post (and with Yorp’s below). I was just after the assertion that in the past we produced enough food to theorically feed everyone but not anymore. We still do. But I certainly didn’t meant that it’s possible to do that theoretical distribution, nor even that it was the way to solve the problem.
I can’t remember my sources on that, to be honest. Plus yours is solid enough that I will not contest it. RockB does point out the correct counters to those raw facts though.
I imagine the sources, which convinced me, used suitable caveats, along the lines he indicated. Showing the difference between hypothetical ‘fair even distribution to everyone’, and the way it works in the real world.
Given that I see children, around me, going hungry, and not even being able to have bread every day, I did not need much in the way of convincing. :-/
Oddly enough I did get to the same website as you, but got bogged down on technical pages, that got really boring. So just went by memory, when posting my reply. I did not think to look for their FAQ page. You chose a sensible research route.
Perhaps it would be better to say, “Far outreaching our ability as evolutionaraly tribal hunter-gatherers to efficiently allocate and utilize resources”.
They could, but they don’t, leaving some areas rich in resources and others under serious risk of being permanently depleted
Maybe less a resort and more an insane asylum.
Or, as Smiling Jack put it. “You’re a big, tough vampire, yeah great, now keep that to yourself.”
Also “This is the era of cell phone cameras, fuck ups aren’t tolerated.”
Yeah, that’s who I immediately remembered. Damn, but that’s a good game. Especially now that it’s been fixed.
*quivering and peering around corner, behind dog kennel*
I bet Jack a’int smiling any more.
If Jack starts to smile like Jeff, you know you’re in deep kimshee…
https://www.creepypasta.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/jeffthekiller.jpg
The owner of that website does not allow hotlinking.
Too bad. I’m hungry and could use some hot links. Especially with some brown mustard and possibly sour kraut.
[head pops up]
Fixed? There were a lot of nitpicky issues with VtVG – what, specifically was fixed? I may have to have to load it up again 12 years later… ah, nostalgia…
Download and install the unofficial fan-made patch. Not only is it the only way to make the game run on some Windows 10 machines (mine didn’t have a problem, but a neighbor wasn’t able to run it until she installed the unofficial patch), but it restores cut content and fixes all the important bugs.
Oh phew!
Glad you clarified that it is only insects being castrated.
Another, more appropriate term would probably be pylon, in the sense that it’s a tower supporting a powerful network.
So you’re saying if something goes wrong, they might have to…
CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS
sorrynotsorry
Mind the Sleestaks and Altrusians.
Hmm, you talking about the towers being Pylons? Or the Sigils, was figuring that the sigils were the spells woven into the towers
Instead of using the word sigil, DaveB should’ve used a word like pylon. I thought of it because in the Flash game “Gemcraft: Labyrinth,” the critical points along the path are tall towers called crafting pylons.
Dave explains his thinking in his blog, above. Regardless of his explanation though, I feel that ‘sigil’ is superior because it indicates the magical nature of the artefact. Wheres pylons are something of modern origin, which would be misleading.
Magical structures can be of any size. The pyramids were meant to have magical (/divine) properties, capable of aiding the transition into the afterlife, for example.
The only detraction is that ‘sigil’ does deal with the symbol, rather than the structure. But if it is that which needs to be maintained (or destroyed) then calling it by the correct term would be vital. You need somebody who understands runes, not just a stonemason, for example. Repairing (or destroying) the associated pillar might do nothing, if the part containing the symbols is not affected.
POO, but to me, a ‘sigil’ is a mystical symbol: it may be in the form or shape of a tower but it’s not, itself, a tower
A sculpture is a drawing in 3 dimensions.
Because it doesn’t look like you can get INTO that thing, it’s entirely possible that it’s simply a sigil drawn in 4 dimensions rather than 2.
Nothing there says there is a tower. Every structure could be different, in order to fit into its surroundings (be it an underground cave, a sealed-off section of the sewer network or the spooky house in your neighbourhood). But the important parts are the sigils inlaid into the floor, and walls of the structure.
Destroy the tower, on the creepy-looking house, and you may think you can now see the monsters. But the sigils may be drawn in the basement, not the tower.
So you are absolutely right to say that the sigil is the mystical symbol. Trouble is that these ones have to be laid onto structures, in order to fulfil their function. Just like a rune-sword’s runes need to be placed on a sword, or they are just pretty pictures, with no power.
Pylons aren’t “of modern origin”, ‘Pylon’ was the Classical Greek term for a monumental gateway of an Egyptian temple…
Point conceded.
Although contextually, pylons are generally associated with power pylons, and similar. So, in the context of picking a name, which carries the correct implications, to the greatest number of people, I stand by the rest of my statement.
Dock pylons, bridge pylons, and others to be revealed at a later time.
I think I will fall back on my reply from another thread. Namely that the comic does not indicate a tower or pylon-like structure being involved. The structures could just as easily be underground caves, warehouses and VHS video repair shops.
The Council would need to have Veil generators in areas of high population in order to keep the effect strong enough to affect everyone. I think I know where the nearest Sigil is. Why bother hiding a big rune covered spire when you can make it a tourist attraction in Central Park?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra%27s_Needle
There are identical artifacts in Paris and London. They need broadcast antennas to reach full effect, hence the erection of the Eiffel Tower and the London Eye. As for New York, You didn’t think the spire on the Empire State building was REALLY to moor airships, did you?
You might remember the incident in New York when a rogue were-ape tried to sabotage the transmitter at the top of the building. Luckily the succubus spy sent by the council was able to mesmerize him into taking her up to roof with him. Once there, she was able to cast a sleep spell. This stopped the sabotage but unfortunately lead to his fall from the building.
Of course any network of towers can be hijacked and used inappropriately. Just look at how a faction, within the USA, decided that it was important to provide public information, regarding the Martian invasion. Until control was reestablished, and the Veil could prevent public sightings of the alien’s war machines, there was widespread panic.
That control got re-established pretty fast…
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/10/30/241797346/75-years-ago-war-of-the-worlds-started-a-panic-or-did-it
But then the underwater Lemurians of Mu decided the Martian invasion shenanigans weren’t enough … they managed to convert the Ecologic/Economic Disaster that was the ‘thirties into WW2 in the hopes of finishing off what WW1/SpanishFlu started in the ‘teens
And was only brought to an end after a series of underwater nuclear “tests” in the pacific.
And then there was that Roswell incident.
And after the E.T.s made nice with the council, the sigil network was moved to orbital positions.
With a lunar booster installed later.
I also believe there are some plans for a system wide upgrade, if it should be needed.
Alternately, if you’re being a little loose, you could say “obelisk”.
Obelisks may be grammatically correct, yet I am not at all sorry to say that they MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS every time the humans hit the population cap.
Sooooooooo….basically world wide minor hypnosis that makes it so normies don’t immediately recognize supernatural people? And it just exists? Like, I don’t want to say this seems a bit contrived, but it is something that seems a bit…shall we say, convenient?
How far apart are all these sigils? If they are fairly dense around the world, what happens if a normal person finds one? If they are sparce, then how powerful are they? Do they need to be recharged? If so, how? When? By whom?
I’m one for having cool things that do stuff, but even I know that there has to be some exchange as power goes up. This is a pretty powerful plot device, so there has to be something like sacrifices or gatherings to give power to…oh…wait…is that what this meeting is for? Are they recharging a Sigil?
The only reason I want to know all of this is so far everything in this has had some sort of balance to prevent over-powered perfection. Halo can only use two orbs at once. Maxima has to balance her powers based on the situations…she can’t just max speed, strength, and defense and hold it. Harem gets weaker as she splits. There is balance.
So having a thing of this amount of power needs to have a weakness. Otherwise it’s just…off putting.
It may simply be like nuclear weaponry. If any faction abuses it too much, say starting an open war against humanity, intending to use it to cloak themselves, then the Council can just turn it off. Note that it is maintained by a network of sigils. So they could just disable the one where illegal action is taking place, and all of a sudden the monsters, on the battlefield, are in plain sight.
Like when that pesky dragon was terrorising the countryside, and found itself plainly visible to George.
Not really, but the “that George” looked like an iron golem to any supernatural party.
Err, not that ‘turning nuclear weapons off’ is an option. I should have concluded by saying that the great power is handled by seed shifts in diplomatic actions. Along with restrictions being placed on political and military power, due to the existence of the unbalancing technomagic.
Hey, in harry potter the same thing was the case, but instead of it being caused by something it was just normies being stupid or something..
The Dresden Files has something like this, only it’s …. I forget….what was I talking about?
If aliens with cow mutilation and anal probing fetishes are amongst us, then they have something which prevents them from being observed most of the time. Whatever device they use presumably was built to have such a purpose. If they, and those activities, turn out to be real, then so will whatever they have been using to conceal themselves.
This is no different. If monsters are amongst us, but mostly undetected, there has to have been something keeping them so well hidden. We have now found out what that is, in the Grrl Power Verse.
What this is though is much more convincing than each race or faction all needing to come up with their own particular way of concealing themselves. Each different technique, or magic, or device, becoming progressively less believable.
As for normal people finding them, they are presumably located where monsters dwell. Monsters those humans cannot see. I do not think that keeping the secret will be that hard, with such an advantage.
And it need not be that sinister. If you are effectively invisible, you can conduct a whole host of distracting techniques. Or, for the more persistent intruders, sabotaging their activities and similar strategies, designed to discourage them from poking their noses into the wrong places.
I’m pretty sure that they simply joined the Meat Packers Union or got a medical license for Proctology, respectively. It would be terrible if you got the two mixed up, maybe, I don’t know.
I hear the aliens are transferring their attention to canines now.
*puts on tinfoil hat*
It looks like I am not alone!
You might need more in a city, but have less powerful ones. Like cell phone towers.
When they take one down for maintenance (re-carving the inscriptions or something) they probably have to get everyone out of the area for the day.
If these things stop everyone seeing unusual people, how can the public now recognise Max?
You just think those things are cellphone towers.
Vampire: “Can you see me now?”
Person: Nodding, not screaming.
Vampire: “Gooood.”
How about trying that again, a couple of miles down the road, with me.
…
OK, do I look normal?
Bad hair day?! 😵
Only if your name is General Woundwort
Apparently, he needs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA2-ZDg0zy8
I need a twin?
NOOOO! Bound to be an evil twin. No, no, no!
No it would be the good twin.
Only Evil if they have a Van Dyke (a perfect example)
Now, why didn’t that work? o_O
There was no URL in the link. It is fairly easy to overwrite the link, when putting in the substitute text, in the tag details. I have done that myself more than once.
Or a mustache that can be twirled.
“You know your last name is an adverb, right kid?”
~Johnny Dangerously, movie
Nope, no idea what you are talking about.
*throws English literature book out of the window*
But, it was copy-pasta’d, like always do (even kept clicking on the image until it was on a page all by itself to avoid loading the full page it was found on)
The link will have almost certainly been pasted in correctly, as it was not blank on your entry, rather the whole section was missing. Ergo I believe you accidentally overwrote the URL when you typed, or pasted in, “a perfect example”. How you may have done this depends on your working technique, be it highlighting text with the mouse or using the keyboard.
The thing, which could have contributed to this, is if the window you were working in was small, in comparison to the size of the URL in question. Which could result in the URL having scrolled up, and being hidden, out of sight, to the working area. Thus preventing you from spotting that you had highlighted more than you intended.
The way I counter these types of problems is to keep a copy of this website open, whenever commenting:
https://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_links_w3schools
Which ensures having a larger workspace, than our regular comments box. But remembering to have the window as near to full sized as is convenient (I do not find maximising to be helpful, as I usually want to keep track of other things, in my screen, beyond just the browser). Doing both ensures no link is ever too big to display fully.
Another trick is to keep things simple, if there is already a large URL present from a previous comment. So clear this by hitting F5, or using the “refresh” gadget in your browser. This will reset the sandbox to its default contents. Making it easier to always hit the right spots, when highlighting text to replace.
Finally, working in the sandbox means it is very convenient to click the “RUN” gadget and test the result. If your URL points to a picture or article, you can then click on the resulting link, on the right hand side, and see if it displays correctly.
Sadly this will not work if dealing with complex websites, like YouTube. So if you were linking a video clip, then you can only test that once the comment has been sent live. Which clearly you were diligent enough to do, given that you immediately spotted the problem yourself. So I mention that part purely for other readers’ information.
Did he find ‘gold in them thar hills’?
I the past, most observations of things like bigfoot or aliens were waaay out in the middle of nowhere. Out of range of the original sigils. Now that the council has arranged for ‘cellphone towers’ to be put almost everywhere the number of sightings has gone way down.
I assumed it was more of the “Oh for crying out loud, they’re all carrying cameras all the time now?” vibe.
They did say globe spanning. I imagine that this was not a short term project. I would think of it in terms of the internet, and networking technologies in general. Probably it started out incredibly crude and basically not working. (Crashing the first time you used it when transmitting the word login…yeesh.)
Over time, with dedicated tweaking, and near constant maintenance, they have made it into something durable and reliable that seems damn near alive at times. At least, that is how I would see something like this.
Or, we could go the simple route. “It’s magic. Don’t got to explain anything.”
They had some bugs with the system when they first turned it on.
Technomage 1: (makes some changes to the inscriptions) “There. Is that any better?”
Technomage 2: “No, the gryphons still look like gryphons and we are still getting those weird side effects. You better figure out what is wrong soon. It has been raining everywhere for around 40 days and it is starting to be a problem.”
The inherent balance in magic is that more pylons might extend the field further but never make it actually stronger. For that you would need a better pylon. Thus the need for vigorous policing of those under the veil. It is equally protecting so everyone has a stake in maintaining it. And an individual or group trying to get out from under it threatens the rest and thus becomes a common enemy. So the status quo is the balance.
Also, if the ratio of Supernatural-Americans (or -whatever) to humanity is the same as that of supers, there may not be that many events to cover up to begin with.
Given that the veil is worldwide and some of those it affects come from even further afield, I think we can safely say that’s just Sydney’s term.
Also, are they AOE, or nodes at the corner of veil-fields? As a presumably magic effect, does Sydney’s shield block it? How far up does it stretch? (I.e. would it fail when your passenger jet reached a certain height?)
What designates a non-sophont’s eligibility for veil access (both from a ‘can see things’ aspect and a ‘can be seen’ aspect)
It’s likely that, between Sydney’s True Sight & her Shield (which blocked Vehemence’s Aggro-Aura during the fight), all “entities” concerned figured it would be best to let her “in the know” rather than making a big fuss about it when she discovers something.
Ah, but what if she has to shield a bunch of civilians? Would they suddenly either see the truth or be revealed? (depending on which side of the veil they sit)
Looks like they are built under ground, and they problem excavate the chamber and build the tower when Norm moves in next door
“…what happens if a normal person finds one?”
Presumably, they’re covered with an (S)omebody (E)lse’s (P)roblem field…
:P
Seriously though, some kind of invisibility spell, coupled with being in an out-of-the-normal-path location should prevent most Normals from accidentally running into one. Of course, now with Pokemon Go on cellphones, people aren’t looking where they’re going anyway (some getting injured & others intentionally “lured” into a bad situation), so they just might bump into one anyway…
Some could be out in the open.
Say one that looks like a tall white obolisk that is sitting in a national capital.
Or 1 that is in a city or three that are religious centers.
Or perhaps they are secreted in “crumbling” ruins that very few people enter.
I do wonder how non-intelligent monsters are handle in this regard. I imagine most are put in places well away from human cities, but the occasional Cockatrice attack (or others of that like) has to be put down and the victims cured (if possible).
Also, I wonder how they handle those humans who can naturally pierce the veil for whatever reason (too much magic affinity, natural seer, took too many drugs, etc…)?
Any one who can naturally lift The Veil is either not a Norm, or they get recruited (or removed from this life)
Several categories are self-correcting.
“Mommy Mommy, there is a monster in the garden!”
“Yes, yes, dear. Daddy will be home soon, and he will go scare it away. Now eat your dinner.”
Society is good at ignoring things which seem out of place.
“Dude, there is a giant green bird, sitting on your roof!”
“If you carry on doing drugs, where there are kids around, I am going to call the cops!”
The others though, as per Dave’s blog above, get ‘the talk’. “Now you can see these things, they can see you!”
There’s a part of that Constantine clip where I swear he yells “Expecto Patronum!” at some spirit bad guy.
Rice handled the hierarchy of the supernatural fairly well in her vampire novels. If you were a young vampire you could just be taken to school or killed out of hand by an older vampire, with extreme cases being the abilities of the most ancient such as the Queen of the Damned just killing young vamps with a thought.
The question then becomes not “How to we police all these young vampires who are new on the scene and think they are bad ass because they are so much more powerful than humans” and more “How do we police the ancients who really have no ability to be policed?” As seen with the Queen of the Damned, she didn’t give a rats ass if humans knew of her existence and the existence of other vampires. She just wanted to go back to the days where she ruled humanity like a shepherd rules a flock of sheep.
That’s why the council is there. They have the resources to stop the madness before it spreads. (With so many parties involved someone have to had the right tool for every ocasion)
Oddly, your comment reminds me of the Keanu version of Constantine. Long story summarized: Two sisters have “the sight” but, whenever they tell anybody about what they see, the adults treat these visions as signs of there being something wrong with the kids. Because of this treatment, one of the sisters starts convincing herself that she isn’t seeing anything unusual until, one day, the visions stop.
The other sister ends up in a nuthouse.
Part of what might help the veil is reinforcing to small children that their “imaginary buddies” aren’t real often enough that their minds eventually accept that as fact and become more susceptible to the Veil.
Yea, I had that in mind too. And referenced the modern remake in another reply elsewhere. Both used the same line “If you can see them, then they can see you too”.
In the Keanu one though, the sister, who eventually became a cop, pretended that she could not see the beasties, and thus was able to insulate herself, somewhat, from them looking back at her.
Except, of course, her sight never went away completely. Although she managed to convince herself that her childhood visions were all fantasy, she still realised, deep down, that her ‘cop instincts’ were far too good to have a scientific explanation.
Although she had pierced the Veil, she still managed to delude herself that it was not real. For a time.
That’s probably something the council has to deal with. While you might not be able to tell the thing to keep a low profile, you CAN play animal-control and kill, capture, or relocate the offending creature. Some species might now live solely in captivity or on magically hidden islands/other inaccessible areas.
It turns out that some people can naturally see past the veil. It is usually those in the ‘artsy’ community. Some of them have managed to depict the beings they see around them in their true form.
https://www.drodd.com/images13/picasso-paintings20.jpg
Ahh, so the Terracotta Army is now explained. A Chinese emperor, who had too much supernatural help, who got an intervention by the Council. Deploying their elite Terracotta Medusae!
This was similar to the Great Easter Island Uprising. The council sent in their medusa corps to deal with the insurrection of the local giant popluation. The results of the battle are scattered all over the island.
Now I want to hear the story behind Michelangelo’s David.
It started as a locker room prank. ‘Hey Mikey, is that a basilisk on your shoulder? Ha! Made you look. Uh oh, somebody call the janitor. We need to move this into the lobby and hope no one recognizes him.”
Somewhere Stargate writers are weeping into their glass of port that they didn’t think of this first.
Sssssshhhh!
Keep it quiet.
At least until we make sure the royalties are doled out fairly.
Troubleshooting -Taking trouble round the back and shooting it.
Bwhaha, rather apt way of putting it, and probably fairly accurate in this case
Isn’t that what all trouble shooting is? Well…that or whacking it with a wrench til it works.
It reminds me of the early Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Justice. In that episode, a planet was perfectly peaceful and idyllic because there was only one punishment for committing a crime – death. You could get knocked off for anything from shoplifting to murder apparently and so everyone behaved.
I’m not convinced it would work so well in real life, mind . . .
Hey, that’s how Vlad Tepes managed to keep the peace
And the enforcement was completely random. You could shoot and kill someone in full view of everyone, and nobody would lift an eyebrow if that “zone” wasn’t being enforced, but trip over a pebble and fall into a flower garden (like Wesley), and the guards will come a long and inject you with a lethal coctail if that particular zone is “active.”
An armed society is a polite society.
Given the number of guns in the US and the corresponding amount of gun violence, that saying has been proven to be incorrect across all of the years of the experiment.
I agree that gun violence can be found everywhere in the US of A, but the worst of it is actually in places that are supposed to be without firearms due to strict legislation or “gun-free zones.” The bad guys typically avoid going on their awful rampages in places where people can defend themselves.
Yes, what is more likely to stop a psychopath with a gun from shooting a bunch of helpless kids at a kindergarten?
1: A sign that reads “Gun Free Zone”
2: A teacher with a concealed carry permit and a Glock.
And what is going to stop a teacher with a concealed carry permit and a Glock from being the one who goes postal?
Indeed. You are more likely to be murdered by somebody that you know, than a stranger. The same is true, as regards kids being murdered. Easy access to guns just makes that simpler to do.
Conversely countries where such attacks occur, but where the assailant only has access to knives, result in far fewer casualties and fatalities, than a similar attack by a Glock wielding teacher or pupil.
“You are more likely to be murdered by someone you know” is a misleading statistic that includes things like drug addicts who know their dealers, criminals who know their rival gang members, and abused spouses who know their abusers.
Actually the raw statistic is that you are more likely to be killed by a member of your family. I just quoted the more general statement (which is also true, because it incorporates the family one) because it was more pertinent, when talking about school teachers.
Let us hope that the instance of school children being murdered, by their dealers, is not high enough to significantly impact on national mortality rates. But, I realise that might be a forlorn hope, in some societies.
If we work on the base assumption that ‘murdering school children’ is not high on anybody’s agenda, then the most significant risk is when individuals are having a mental-health issue. Such as having such a severe bout of depression, as to feel it necessary to take not just their own lives, but the lives of others.
This is something that can happen to any of us in society. We are all at risk, every year, from depression or other mental illness. As such the more time you spend in the company of any given individual, the greater the risk you face that you will be around them, should they some day snap.
Moreover, having a close relationship with them can put you at greater risk, in such circumstances. Given that they can rationalise their acts as protecting you from harm (a.k.a. putting you out of your misery).
Thus teachers are a risk. Just not as great a risk as your family!
The student with a rifle in their locker for hunting season?
Ahh, yes, the ultimate solution. Ensure that children have guns at school too. We know how responsible they are. And never have any temper-tantrums. Or show off how macho they are.
But I did grow up in a country with a gun culture. So I know how pervasively important it can feel. Especially when living in fear that others will try to rob or murder you.
Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in a country with an out of control gun problem. That country too now has a sky-high murder rate.
I had the option of moving back there, when I was looking to emigrate. I considered it for about half an hour, before concluding that living without fear, and the need for a gun to compensate, was far better.
I’m not sure what country you’re referring to,m but if you mean the US, the crime rate has been going down for a long while and has only gone up in the past year or so.
“We know how responsible they are. And never have any temper-tantrums. ”
I know what you mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eNnu5ODlrU
Wait…
How is that a brawl? Not one punch was thrown, and the announcers seemed very calm
Ken Arromdee I was not referring to the US. Besides which, the crime rate is actually irrelevant. All that matters is the fear, which drives individuals to feel the need to arm themselves.
You can have identical crime rates, in two hypothetically similar countries. But if one has a gun culture, then you get an arms race between criminals and civilians. Which just results in many deaths.
Whereas the other, without that desire to shoot fellow citizens, has the same problem with criminals, but does not have the gun-related deaths. If someone pulls a knife on you, and demands your wallet, you just hand it over. As opposed to reaching for your gun, and rolling the dice to see who dies first!
Duende Sociopata I don’t think arming politicians, or any members of the public, is a good idea.
Army: yes, cops: no,* civilians: no, children: Hell no!
Do note though that my basic principles should not be mistaken for proposing a solution for a country with an out-of-control gun problem.
That is for citizens, in those countries, to find a workable solution. If one can be found which eliminates killing vast numbers of their own population, yet still keeps guns in the hands of civilians, I would be “yay guns”. Nobody has convinced me that can be done though.
With the exception of Switzerland, of course. Keep guns in civilian (militia) hands, but purely for national defence purposes. But that would require a seed change in attitudes towards guns. Which is not likely in countries with a strong gun culture.
* Other than specialist armed response units, proportionate to the level of gun crime in the country in question.
Guesticus: I don’t know, I just take the first video on a “senate fight” search :P
BTW, not sure about it but I understand that this level of physical exchange meant BIG business from an Asian culture point of view.
Yorp: Sorry, I wanted to point out adults acting like the childrens you referred, not to take a position about the topic. I should have been clearer.
Can understand that, was more having a joke about a serious matter (even when they are getting unruly, they are still ‘civilized’ {for ease of understanding} enough not to resort to fists ☺)
Duende Sociopata no apologies necessary. I just insert a comment, along those lines, anytime gun control debates get too close to politically sensitive areas. Plus I have to factor in my own bad habits of teasing Americans. So need to try and preempt any offence, that may be taken, if they feel I am attempting to maliciously interfere in domestic politics.
If I could offer a workable solution (and my little grey cells do keep trying to come up with options) I would do so. But, without that, all I can say is that I do not like the current situation.
The trouble is, with polarised debates, that each side gets entrenched in fighting for the extreme positions (“we should abolish guns” vs “yay guns”). Meaning that too few people concentrate on finding working solutions.
Ignoring the ‘how do you get there’ problems, my little grey cells suggest that this would be a good position to aim for:
• Abolish guns in private hands. With the exception of folks living in remote bear-infested locations, who can show they cannot protect themselves with just non-lethal scaring devices.
• Have local arsenals of militia guns, in case the population wish to make war on the government. These should be guarded by local militias and not used for any other purposes. Well except for defending the country, if it comes under attack.
• Have all recreational guns restricted to being kept in appropriately secure club arsenals. Hunting clubs, rifle ranges and the like. With strict controls on taking them out (rather necessary for hunting) and dealing with any lost or stolen.
As for how to get there, that involves boring local politics. So let me instead offer a fun solution.*
Have all legal weapons fitted with IFFs declaring the use (“I am a police officer’s sidearm” and uniquely identifying the weapon). Then release hunter-killer robots that go out and kill anybody carrying a gun without an IFF.
Of course criminals will be able to fit fake versions on to illegal weapons. But those weapons will be transmitting a signal, so can be easily found. Giving law enforcement an edge in combating them. Plus everywhere that currently has CCTV cameras, can have a killer bot built in next to it. So if a villain whips out a weapon, which was previously hidden from scanning, he will be eliminated when trying to use it.
Yea yea, loads of incorrect identifications will be made, kiddies with toy guns killed, and cops with broken IFF transponders likewise. But that is happening anyhow. Whereas this would be in a good cause!
:-D
* “Fun” as in the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”.
@Yorp
Something very similar has been tried… smartguns that will only fire when it detects the user’s biometric profile.
The result? Death threats against any gun shop daring to stock them. Despite the fact that they’re not forcing anyone to buy them.
Such reactions have happened every time an innovation threatened the status quo, since the Luddites. But those inventions which are socially useful, practical and have a demand ride out such trivia, in the long term. Only something which is morally repugnant, to the broader society, would have sufficient protest to inhibit such developments.
One further step, that could be made, for those biometric weapons (once they become reliable enough to add this) is to make their operation highly tinker-proof. There is nothing which cannot be hacked mind. But it is possible to make the hassle of doing so significant enough that it is cheaper to build a new gun, than to remove the safeties on an existing one.
For instance building the detection and protection circuitry into the most expensive and mechanically complex part of the gun, at a nano-scale. Such that, in order to swap out the biometric function, and replace it with a generic part, you are having to spend a lot of money.
Mind you biometric systems still do not prevent legal gun owners from going postal. But nor would my kill-bots, so your point is well made, from that angle.
The problem is that the threats worked. The gun stores stopped carrying the biometric guns, and because nobody would buy them, the gun manufacturers stopped making them. At this point, the only way they’re ever going to try again is if there is a government mandate, which I don’t think is going to happen any time soon.
@ Ken Arromdee
The truth is that, overall across the country, gun violence has actually diminished since Obama started his “gun control agenda.” A lot of people who didn’t own guns then own them now & learned how to use them properly & safely.
Then again, in the news-cycle, they put high priority on any kind of mass shooting because they want to make more people afraid of guns. Even though FBI statistics show that more crimes are stopped by law-abiding citizens who carry than what the news reports in mass shootings (you ever hear of the good guys winning on the news anymore?), the networks put far too much emphasis on fear-mongering than actual fact.
Incorrect. They do it because there is more profit to be made by covering mass-shootings. Individually they might deny this. But the collective result is that “people are more interested in mass shootings [for whatever reason]” ergo, if you want to get them reading/ watching you blathering on about something, you are more likely to get them to pay if waffling about something that interests them.
It is our fault in being interested in mass shootings, and clicking on the link. Stop being so bloody morbid!
Here is my suspicion.; The biometric guns are not very good. If you have a product that will not work the way you advertise it, 100% of the time, you will not stick your neck out defending or promoting it.
Wait a while. In due course we will get a technology that actually does the job well, in real life situations (which is very different to the controlled conditions that advertisers like to fool you with). If you can get a company which will can say, with certainty, that “no cop or prison guard, who has one of our weapons stolen from them, need ever fear being shot with that gun, nor any other innocent person” then you will have a product that will sell off the shelves.
Any company which has made that claim, untruthfully, will have suffered the consequences of their bravado and/or outright lies.
All just my tipsy gut feelings. Feel free to tear my logic apart. :)
Ah, the fallacy of the locked away gun used for protection.
“Excuse me sir, can you stop shooting up my class while I collect something from my locker. I’ll be right back. I promise”
And the fallacy of more guns solving the problem.
Someone with a gun will stop the shooter. And a third person with a gun mistakes the second person for the shooter and shoot them. Then a forth person sees a fifth with their gun drawn, for protection, and mistakes them for the shooter too. In the end, more die from friendly fire and the police aren’t even sure who the original shooter was.
Yea, more guns makes it safer.
That fact that in order to GET a concealed carry permit, you go through a full background check and psychological evaluation.
Duh.
Do they get annual re-evaluation, and regular mental health checks?
Because that is what pilots need, in order to be trusted with machines that can kill many people. And it is needed. Because mental health issues can affect anybody, at any point in their lives. Not just on the date that they apply for a permit.
In that case, start annual mental evals for anyone to renew their driver’s license too…
:P
That does happen, in the UK, with anyone who is in a suspect category. Such as being partially blind (one of my mates was, so I know he had to get re-assessed periodically to prove he could see OK, at night), or being old (once past a certain age you have to get retested, periodically, not every year, but often enough to be a burden).
Just because it sounds like it is infringing your ‘rights’ does not mean that it is actually an unfair principle.
Why not require everyone to take such a check before getting a gun. And make them give them up when they fail the periodic re-evaluation. Doesn’t sound a big hardship.
But look at the fight it took to even get a vote on the “no fly, no buy.”
Trick question. Psychopaths, people with political terror agendas, and the mental ill don’t care either way. In some cases of mental illness, where the person is also trying to commit suicide, the gun rich zone may be preferable.
As long as we don’t start promoting the ideas that:
1) All people carrying out shootings are mentally ill.
2) All people who are mentally ill are likely to go one shooting rampages.
Because neither are true. But the media often puts the impression of one or the other across.
First off, that’s not true at all. While people considering committing some crime might commit that crime elsewhere if they think that their target might be armed, that doesn’t lessen the amount of crime, it just transfers it around a bit.
Second, unhinged people don’t sit back and rationally think “Hmm, I can kill more people if it isn’t near a police station.” Because unhinged people lack that kind of thought process. In fact we have seen recently in the news that unhinged people have actually targeted police, which is the exact opposite of avoiding people and places where your victims are armed and can fight back.
And third, the trite saying “only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun” is just wrong on many levels. In multiple simulations “good guys with a gun” quite often caused innocent casualties due to poor aim and panic, or a simple lack of the understanding of exactly who was the bad guy in some situation.
How many gun stores have you heard of that have been held up?
When you phrase it like that it sounds like a hillarious thing to do. Please quit filling my head with comedy crime ideas.
Never heard of one in the UK (my experience only, so not saying it has not happened). However, in case you were not being rhetorical, here are the headline results, from my search for “gun store robbery”. I removed any obvious duplicates, but I could have missed others, which are referring to a single incident, in different reports:
Suspects at-large after gun store robbed in Waxahachie | WFAA.com, Jul 10, 2016
Police Arrest 3 Suspects in Gun Shop Robbery Video – ABC News, Mar 3, 2016
Another Arrest In Deadly Gun Store Robbery – San Angelo, 28 mins ago
Thieves steal $40,000 worth of rifles from Newnan gun store – CBS46
Arrest made in Casselberry gun store robbery | Local News – WESH, Aug 4, 2016
Seventh arrest made in Waxahachie gun store robbery – Story | KDFW, Aug 15, 2016
Arrests made after SUV from Rocklin gun store robbery found, Jul 13, 2016
Wake County gun shop worker fires shot during armed robbery | WNCN, Aug 2, 2016
Juveniles in botched Vandalia gun shop robbery to remain jailed – WHIO
Police: Men Steal $20,000 in Guns from Store | wltx.com, Aug 5, 2016
1 killed, 1 hurt in Corpus Christi gun store robbery | KXAN.com, Sep 2, 2016
Newton gun store robbery caught on tape | http://www.ajc.com – Atlanta
Failed robbery attempt at Pleasant Grove gun store, 3 in custody, Jul 27, 2016
Police searching for suspects in J & M Outdoors gun store robbery, Aug 25, 2016
Police searching for suspects after apparent smash-and … – Louisville, Jul 28, 2016
New Surveillance Video in Gun Store Robbery Attack; $15k … – Fresno
FBI searches for fifth suspect in Dundalk gun shop robbery – Baltimore, Aug 29, 2016
Four Dallas Teens Arrested In Waxahachie Gun Store Robbery, Jul 28, 2016
It was too depressing to go onto the third page of results. Given how many, apparently diverse, instances have occurred, and recently, on the first two pages alone.
Translation for Dr. Revenge: You don’t hear about them on national news. You have to get the local news… but gun store robberies do happen, and not infrequently.
All the articles Yorp listed were in just a five month period, this year. To be fair, some of them were probably related to the same story. For example, I’d bet that all three of the Waxahachie articles were related to the same robbery. I’m actually grateful that the Pleasant Grove robbery was in Alabama, not Texas… because I live less than two miles from the Pleasant Grove (Texas) city limits.
So, “how many gun stores have you heard of that have been held up?” Mmm… I’d have to say several.
Firearms are valuable. People steal or try to steal them all the time.
@ Dr. Reveng
I’ve read an article about a guy who tried to rob a gun store using a baseball bat. That didn’t go over too well for him…
Riker was enthusiastic about the culture since they, in his words, made love at the drop of a hat. Or his trousers, apparently. Being all happy and groggy from constant fucking is probably more of what contributed to their peaceful nature than the fear of death due to inadvertently breaking some law.
Quozl, a novel by Alan Dean Foster, explores this idea using human-sized bipedal anthropomorphic rabbits who have a very structured society with strict rules on where and how violence is allowable – highly ritualized. Once the humans became less repressed sexually, they got violent a lot less often.
Apparently, rabbits are violent little bastards. I’ve always suspected the cute was a distraction.
On a side note, it’s not the ears that makes the sociopath – it’s the tail.
::twitches his long silky ears and flickers his long silky tail.::
Those are mightily impressive ears.
Ears? Who needs ears. Only good for holding up your glasses.
Weren’t those Tasha Yar’s words, actually? I seem to remember Tasha saying, “They make love at the drop of a hat. Any hat.”
And Worf said . . .
I’m going to talk to my intersteallar travel agency to see if there’s any tickets available…
Yes, that’s how a player in my old gaming group used to put i: “We make trouble… then we shoot at it.”
I find the lack out Outer Entities and other Eldritch beings a bit… disappointing
This is just the General Meeting of the Council, not a representation of every being
well there is that and the fact that the more powerful ones would… unravel reality just by being there :D
Dabbler beat them and take all the loot.
took*
If any are social (and not world-ending) enough, they might be lumped in with miscellaneous. However, many such beings, if they exist in this universe, should be the type of things that, if summoned to our world, the veil would probably be broken almost instantaneously.
That sort of thing would be part of a galactic council, not a planetary council on what appears to be somewhat of a backwater planet.
Cthulhu hit the snooze button.
Yog-sogoth is running late.
Azathoth didn’t have the energy.
And Nytharlahotep is there in disguise.
…Is it just me, or do these sigils look a little like the deflector shield generator towers that Obi Wan disables in the Death Star from A New Hope?
*waves wing* These are not the mythical beings you are looking for.
The glowy bit in the middle made me think more akin to the TARDIS, mind you my imagination may just be a little overactive
When I look above the square bits, and into the cables above, they form a head-like shape similar to the pilot, from Farscape. Once you see that, then segments can look like eyes. The glowing gap, further down becomes a gaping maw…
… at about which point you realise that this is “somebody else’s problem”, and decide to move on.
Right, but I was thinking something along the lines of some overeager truth seeker out there finding out about this, and plotting for years (with the picture chart on the wall, the fanciful and outlandish method they use to suppress the effects of the Veil, the underground network of like minded people, etc) and then sneaking in all Jedi-esque and leaving ARCHON and the Council to play evil empire, which causes Sydney to have a moment of “Wait, are we the bad guys in this?”
If it turns green and starts hissing you may need to run.
That and if it does come to blows, the human world with its numbers and ARC will probably kick the supernatural world’s ass, so there is good incentive to stay hidden.
Arianna, you have been doing a good job. Subjects are responding, within anticipated parameters.
With a little help by Max.
There is such a thing as “unacceptable rate of exchange”, for BOTH sides.
This is called M.A.D.
Mutually Assured Destruction.
The only way to win, is not to play.
Now I want to see more of that gorgon/naga/lamia… :P
Let me know when you do. My garden could do with a good centre-piece.
My garden already has several nagas but my most prized one is the viper in my window box.
If there was ANOTHER vampire,aside from Ingsol,I think he should resemble the one in the link below:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu
Or here’s a close up:
https://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2015/07/Count_Orlok.jpg
Maybe he is somewhere else, or his day off, or simply the other vamps don’t want to sit next to him
I think he would look like the guy speaking in panel 7, above. Likewise the two delegates sitting next to him. Given that they are all in the box with the vampire banner draped from it! Not forgetting that we are also familiar with Crimson and Scarlet.
But you are right, Count Orlock/Nosferatu is a classic, well worthy of getting a future nod.
Wait…. what if someone got caught on video by accident by some individual with a camera?
Also, Is the background of impalement a reference to the 1992 Bram Stoker Dracula film?
If they did get ‘accidentally’ caught on video, it would simply get covered-up, that has been in effect for centuries (yes, even long before cameras)
The Sigil makes the video or picture blurry as hell, no matter how good the camera is or what sort of autofocus it has. Have you never noticed that every picture or video of UFOs, ghosts, monsters, etc. is never clear, in focus, or even centered in frame? Despite cameras doing that automatically for the most part and seeing something like that should be important enough for the person to actually try to take a good picture?
This Veil thing explains much.
Yup. It happens all the time, even today.
Didn’t read the article, but are they claiming Australia is veiled in some sort of magic? Would explain a lot about the inhabitants :P (it is a kiwi’s job, to never pass up an opportunity to rag on our poor neighbours across the ditch ☺)
It just showed some grainy footage. Proving that the field is in effect, and blurring the images, of what should otherwise be nice and crispy clean pictures, due to modern auto-focus.
It’s not completely outrageous. I was hiking in the Appalachian mountains when I came upon a black bear momma with four cubs. This is a really rare event, as the average litter for a black bear is one or two. Triplets are rare, and four is something that is unbelievably rare.
The momma took off running, and the cubs all went up a tree. Then the momma came back and called them down from the tree, and they kept running. I took a pile of pictures, but I was so excited by the event that I didn’t manage to get a single shot with all four cubs in the frame at the same time, and a lot of my shots were of the bears were blurred because the focus picked a tree between myself and the bears. I’m a fairly good photographer and I have an excellent camera, and the lens I had on at the time was a $1,300 70-200 f/2.8 lens, but I was set up for scenery shots, not sports shots. So I can completely understand how seeing Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster can result in bad pictures. Not that I believe in either, but then I’d have been almost as skeptical had someone claimed to have seen a black bear with four cubs.
I bet it had a four-leafed clover stuck behind its ear!
*wags tail cheekily*
Good points though.
It may well be. The movie itself lent heavily on the history surrounding Vlad the Impaler (more correctly known as Vlad III of the house of Drăculești, Prince of Wallachia, and member of the Order of the Dragon).
Interestingly enough he was also invoved with the houses of Bathory and Corvinus at various times in his life, another two families who are mentioned quite regularly in vampire stories to this day.
Read it again:
“The veil is a massive, globe spanning spell, which suppress human awareness of supernatural creatures and events.”
The ones bewitched are we humans, so it doesn’t matter where or how we witness a supernatural thing, the Sigils make us unable to perceive it.
Very astutely argued point!
Thank you! It happens :P
Quite a lot. Both with yourself, and other commentators. There is only so many times you can complement such though, without sounding too sycophantic. So I usually place a caveat on any such praise, where it is possible to find a flaw. In this case I failed to find one.
Well, you have a good amount of cunning posts yourself, and on top fancily worded (and worded, and worded, :P). I don’t really have a rule but I find myself replying more to good arguments and ideas, my way of show approbation I guess ;)
DaveB, have you been watching The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, then? It had a character named Irwin who had a Mummy for a mother and his grandfather was a vampire.
It’s always entertaining when a mundane encounters one of my people doing our Socially Inartful, Yet Brutally Accurate Assessment Of Your ‘Thing’ shtick for the first time. And Sidney’s so very good at it, too.
Troubestabbing. That’s a good term. I’m going to start using that in my D&D games.
A Supernatural U.N.!
And these Peace Keepers actually succeed!
Now if we could only copy them.
I think they might be trying to let ARC handle some of their cases for now, when the humans might spot them, or start to slowly emerge. Either way, things will need to be talked out.
That’s only because the real UN are only allowed to observe, they are, as you said, Peace Keepers, not Enforcers
How does the Veil differentiate between supers and monsters? Because obviously, supers are being allowed to be seen… Is it just that everyone looks like a normal human?
Maybe it’s because Supers are still human? o_O
Agreed.
Which just brings up the question of Dabbler or does having your own personal glamour effect exclude you from the Veil coverage plan?
What question? If you meant “why can Norm see her?”, maybe all non-humans can choose to ‘opt-out’, or more likely, they have to ‘opt-in’, willingly or not
Succubi need an exemption from the Veil. How could a succubus seduce her target if the person could not see her?
The veil doesn’t make the supernatural invisible, just cloak them. (Maybe some got invisibility out of this deal but judging by Sydney’s past experiencies its a global glamour spell not invisibility one).
Then the question becomes, how could a succubus seduce her target if the target sees merely a ‘normally beautiful’ woman instead of a being of ‘pure arousal’?
I think it is more like a personal descrambling field.
Dave, the problem isn’t that you have broken a rule of good sequential art, the problem is that you have sort of committed to posting Who’s Who tags for characters that talk, so every time someone interjects, it adds to your work.
They have to talk, and be formally introduced and named, not everyone who talks will be named, and not everyone who talks and gets named will become a recurring character entitled to their own mugshot (still feel the readers should get to vote on the mugshot, as some that have been used are not very good ones, and there have been better ones even on the page their ‘official’ mugshot was taken from)
“Sigil engineering” would look awesome on a CV.
I’ve seen vampires killed oh so many ways but I think being turned to stone might actually be an original way to take one down but failing that its at least new to me.
I wonder…If you move a “stoned vampire” into the sunlight, would he heat up until material expansion makes him crumble, or would he melt into slag?
O.o
More likely he would be covered in pigeon poop. Since it leaves you hella vulnerable in its own right and requires a stone to flesh spell to reverse (if you even can reverse a true Medusa’s ability) I think allowing it to stand as a way for vampires to “survive” sunlight seems reasonable.
I wonder if the stone will turn all “sparkly” in the sunlight?
I’d say it depends on the type of stone. Some are pretty crystaline.
Heliotrope? (yes I know it was also known as the “Sunstone” but I’ve often heard of purifying or sacrificing very negative things to gain a powerful positive artifact. [sort of along the same lines as the magical/supernatural bad guys loving to corrupt a holy place or thing cause it always seemed to produce the most powerful negative shrines/artifacts. Usually, whichever way the conversion went, it was more powerful once “turned” then the original… ])
Nah, the stoned vampire will just say “Dude, it’s like, totally bright here. Let’s bail pronto.”
“There are the sigils. At least one, and probably all of them will be destroyed or otherwise rendered non-funtional before our tale is out”
I just had a disturbing thought. These sort of items usually need to be powered up once in a while with something like a sacrificing a virgin. “Oh Sydney, could you come over here? We need your help with something.”
Maybe they lucked out and powerful ancient supernatural beings, the kind that think they are strong enough to be above the law or to enslave humanity/eradicate an enemy species, also made good power sacrifices?
Kind of a two-fer during the whole “troublestabbing” period of The Council. Maybe that’s why they will later work towards being peacefully revealed to the humans as their current peace is making it difficult to keep the Sigils powered up anyway…
So is this peace a delicate balance? Because just maintaining THE VEIL can’t be easy.
Just that would make a cool spin-off.
Why aren’t superhumans hidden by The Veil? With the large range of beings already disguised by it, I would think superheroes would fall within the bounds of “supernatural creatures”.
They are Johny-come-latelies that either weren’t encoded in the Veil search and conceal parameters, or are still too human to be covered by the fantasy racist glamour.
Emphasis being Superhuman: they may have supernatural powers and slash or abilities, but they are still human
omg racist glamour. well it’s more like… speciesist? that would explain why we have all this folklore about supernatural people living out where no-one else hung out, like deep in the woods, high in the mountains, or along dangerous rivers, but once people became more populous sightings are all but zero. i like the explanation that the technology for concealment just got very good, rather than extinction.
but this does beg the question, why isn’t Dabbler covered by THIS world-wide glamour, even when she takes off her personal glamour? is there an opt-out option?
i’m also wondering if the amaze-balls are covered by a smaller version of that kind of glamour.
Maybe personal glamour effects and the Veil are incompatible? So the price of being able to customise your appearance without interference is that you have be excluded from the Veil’s coverage.
Dabbler was my first thought too. Doesn’t her participation in ARC-SWAT threaten the Council? Why are they allowing it? Hopefully that will come up soon.
The hit squad is just waiting for this council meeting to go hunting her xD
Remember, dear Troubleshooters, your job is to Shoot Trouble, that’s why you are lowly Red Clearance Level Troubleshooters. This has been your daily reminder from the glorious Friend Computer. And remember, happiness IS mandatory so take your Mandatory Happiness Pills and stay happy or else report yourself on your communications device and request your Self Termination Pill. :D
BTW, Ingsol appears not to be swapping w/v here in at least one place he should — “we” in panel 6.
I have a feeling he’s given it up as a bad ploy against Sidney – clearly, she is not impressed by the Spooky Accent.
Hah I love the Stargate reference!
Which one was it that you noticed? was it the point of origin symbol or was it the symbol of Ba’al?
And right below it, ye olde Star Trek emblem.
More importantly, are there any peanuts in that gallery?
Nah, they couldn’t get a license from the Charles M. Shultz estate to avoid copyright infringements, so the council can’t recruit them as members.
What about this guy? In a world of were-hares and were-dire-wolves, a were-peanut would fit right in!
But how long could he last if meeting up with were-elephants?
How about a were-beagle that sometimes LARPs a biplane pilot?
That already happens. Not to mention feasibility studies on taking it further.
Yes indeed, it certainly does already happen. Or at least it used to . . .
RIP Charles Schulz.
My mind immediately went to “how could you abuse something like this?” And it became obvious that the Rothschilds were a vampire clan.
I can see a similar conversation as happens in Divine Blood. “There’s “a community” and “The Community”…the capital letter is SUPER important.”
sigh…it’s not Racist…biased or preferential but the sigils are inanimate and non-sentient…it’s like saying that a ride is racist because you have to be 48″ tall to ride it. or a duck blind is racist because it hides hunters from the ducks. It concerns me the way the definition of racist is morphing in the world today.
I actually think it’s accurate. The spell discriminates based on race. That’s not how the term is usually used, and it carries a lot of connotative baggage which doesn’t apply here, but Sydney’s odd cognitive leaps are part of her charm (and help drive a lot of the comic’s humor).
The ride isn’t racist – it’s heightist. The duck blind isn’t racist because anyone can use a duck blind so it doesn’t descriminate. In theory, a duck could just as easily use it to hide from humans.
The race of course being humans (almost typed Hunans – stupid hooves).
Donkeys aren’t stubborn – we just see things you Two-Legs don’t get to see, so we’re making our decisions based on more information.
And, of course, we hear a lot more stuff too.
::wiggles his ears and gives a dopey grin::
Mmmm… Cloned Mummy Dinosaur Goddess.
Also – Supernatural-Americans?? Pretty sure the Veil covers the entire planet, Syd. Nice ethnocentrism there.
She is just trying to fin in her role.
Yes, the veil would seem pretty ineffective if America is the only nation (or continent) with no superhumans.
Also supernatural? Nature is roughly everything that is not modified by humans. So these entities seem pretty natural. Even the ghosts. If ghosts, gods, etc. exist, they are part of nature.
It’s definitely no fairy tale.
Recently, human technology has made progress in circumventing Veil effects. Developers have come up with an app that lets cell phones use their internal camera to display normally hidden creatures. It turns out that Pokemon Go creatures are REAL!
which is where Digimon come in. Pokemon Go is the conversion software allowing storage in the Ecto-Containment System.
“Do not pull that switch, I’m warning you.”
That explains so much.
Of course, if the Pokemon get fed up at being captured, they could start turning on the players. Anybody holding a smart phone would become a legitimate target, in a world-wide monster uprising!
I wonder if geocached malware is a thing yet. Maybe something subtle for a start, like modifying autocorrect to change all of the ”you’re” to ”your”. Or posting your entire camera roll to Instaregret. I mean Instagram.
If it isn’t yet, I assume it will be shortly.
“Way to go, Ray.”
All of the pokemons will soon be 3-D models of a dancing, nude Rosie O’Donnell! MWAHHAHAHA!
For those who stumble upon such a sight, I’ve got a line in the Brain Bleach™ franchise, which also includes supplies of Inter-Cranial Sandpaper™.
Bad, bad people! The name meant nothing to me, but a google search found her easily enough. And I recognise her as a nice person. Don’t make her feel bad about herself! She may be a fellow reader. Or one of her catty friends might point her at this thread.
If she was your neighbour, would you say that to her face?
*wags paw accusingly*
Such comments gain a cheap laugh, but at the expense of a real person. No matter that they are famous enough, that they are used to it, we should be better than that!
Besides which she is pretty enough that (if I were lucky enough to land her) I would happily introduce her as my wife. So no being rude to her!
*growls, with hackles up*
I can honestly say, from first hand experience, that she is a horrible person. She said worse to my face the one time I had to deal with her.
Fair enough then.
I am going to create a program that scans for stupidity on Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook and posts it all to one site for easy viewing. I will call it You-Twit-Face.
I can’t help but suspect the council proably doesn’t mobilize for small stuff. A vampire kills a dude but keeps it subtle? maybe the council’s problem. a mage rips a bunch of people off by using just a bid of mind control to get people to fall for a scam? not the councils problem.
While I doubt its a statistically significant amount of deaths a year, there are a lot of ways the veil could be abused that would be subtle enofgh that the council might not notice let alone care. I mean how would the feel about scrying enabled insider trading for example?
All true. But not much different to how things work in the human world. You declare something to be illegal, but if most of the time people can get away with doing it, by being discreet, then many people will go ahead anyway.
The way it is handled, by legal systems, is to increase the penalty proportionate to how hard it is to detect the problem. For example, in financial terms this means that the fine must always be greater than the potential profit which could be made by ignoring the law, and just budgeting on paying the penalty periodically.
Assuming that the hidden world comes up with similar solutions, this means that they would not turn a blind eye to a human being murdered, under cover of the Veil. Even if, in social terms, they would otherwise be unconcerned by the act. Someone abusing the system that way is increasing the risk of the whole system being exposed (given how intensively murders can be investigated). So the penalty will be much greater than the weight they normally give to taking a human life.
Vampires kill someone? So do humans. No big deal.
Bernie Madoff swindled thousands…
The CIA experiments on US citizens.
Making people believe in vampiric existence to the point where it taken as a given (and the soon to follow inevitiable inquisition) THAT is the Heresy that must be punished.
Treating the universal laws of physics like a mild suggestion on a macro-newtonian scale?
UNACCEPTABLE!
All these humans that become super though … and coming out like this. I am certain the other supernaturals were not at all thrilled about this.
I bet this is their first opportunity to really say how some of the peanut gallery feel about this.
You probably right. It was ARC-Light who stopped the serial propagator after all.
Given that Sydney is co-owner of a comic book shop she should be well aware of the possible rivalries of these groups. Oh sure comics are highly fictional but if even 10% of their contents prove to be true she should be better prepared for dealing with the council than 90% of the rest of humanity.
Heck, look at humans. We have the occasional serial killer, violent disputes of every kind, and generally don’t get along. Having a taste for human blood can’t help that (and I doubt extreme longevity makes you value short human lives any more).
Sydney’s next question should be regarding coverage, redundancy, and security. There are bound to be individuals or groups that would find the chaos of a disrupted veil in a populated area to be beneficial. Also, are such individuals or groups already known?
Blow a node in a major U.S. city, preferably one with an above-average number of gun-owners, and someone WILL panic and attack the “monsters.” At least SOME of these non-human entities will reasonably defend themselves rather than flee, which will lead even the more level-headed humans who would have initially resorted to peaceful interaction in calmer circumstances to join the fight to protect other humans. This would quickly escalate to an all-out war that no one can cover up.
Really? people get shot in dallas all the time. Famous ones too. No great war.
South Chicago has rough week and it exceeds the annual murder rate of the surrounding municipalities within an 600 mile radius.
remember those “zombies” that got killed in florida that turned out to be some junkies on a new designer drug? In the news all of a week?
A blown node (if fixed quick) is not a problem.
Guess that depends on how many resident supernaturals they have in the region and how powerful the ones who can get away are.
But yeah if they get there and get the lost lambs evacuated fast enough while dumping fresh cadavers in monster suites around preferably with damage similar to any wounds that monster suffered on video already being posted all over online then probably blow over fairly quickly. (it would be both really smart and wonderfully ironic if lots of the friendlier monster types decided to be “monster” make-up/effects people in the film industry)
Might be a nice back-up if a Sigil going down set off a secondary device to knock out or suppress the function of human technology in most of the same region.
“can’t get away” Can’t. (I swear chrome “corrects” my typing into typos)
Think noon in New York City. Suddenly, there are lizard-people, vampires, demons, aliens, and even more worrying things in the middle of crowded outdoor areas, streets, bars, etc. The non-human population density was great enough that Sydney saw 2 nearby in the same club with only casual observation. We’re talking about THOUSANDS of individuals in NYC with a conservative estimate of population density based on the club (very little data there, but I’m going for order of magnitude). If an average of 10 people see each such entity (some will be in the bathroom, others will be in Times Square. We’re talking 10s to 100s of thousands. You can’t suppress that many eye-witnesses. There will be a few people savvy enough to smell BS.