Grrl Power #504 – Rollback
Krona’s problem is that she can’t google “time loop” and see how other reality hackers have approached it. There’s no GitHub for what she does. Amusingly, there are a lot of stories of early games back in the day turning out how they did because the programmers just didn’t know what how to do what they wanted.* In Krona’s case, experimentation may not be a great idea – but for all she knows the universe has a killer error handling routine.
The “spells” she comes up with are difficult to test, and she doesn’t know how to make a universe in a box to play around in unlike some people. Chances are she’ll have to stick to smaller tricks for a while.
*I just watched this cool video of a GDC presentation by Peter Molyneux where he talks about one of the major game features of Populus (it was an amazing game you young people) where you could elevate the ground, all arose because he couldn’t figure out how to program the AI behavior when the people reached the edges of the land. Also that Molyneux, game industry luminary, got into making games because someone mistakenly gave him a bunch of Amigas. Watch the video it’s pretty interesting.
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Close one.
If you include the time, not exclude.
Just beat me to it…
Are you including it in the local-time, or excluding it from Maxima’s timeframe?
Excluding doesn’tmake sense, whoever’s perspective you’re talking about.
go go team crowd source editing
Whoops, duh.
are you going to retcon that?
Not necessary. It is casual speech by Sydney and she does make the odd mistake here and there.
Besides which it is actually correct. Two negatives are a positive. Sydney is subtracting negative time, so you add that.
Perhaps it’s time to get back to the angry blood mage troll/ogre/elf in the warehouse.
Angry troll would have been reset, so knows nothing about whats happening outside… local loop has to include her otherwise it couldn’t include Sydney and Pixel
Yes, but she is the target of this mission. And there were other blood sacks in that room.
SHE’S NOT A TROLL!!!! Nor is she a vampire, she is a Blood Mage of an undetermined not-vampire race whose top half of her skull was stitch (literally) on to the body (from the lower jaw down) of either an ogre or an orc (of undetermined gender)
She used troll blood to heal though.
So? You eating a black pudding doesn’t make you a pig, does it?
Or having a ‘plasma’ transfusion from a coconut doesn’t make you one either
My grandfather was one half coconut I’ll have you know.
My sister was bitten by a coconut once…
If she had investigated the incident more thoroughly, she may have found that it was actually an arthropod. Members of the ‘extended family’ are well known for hanging about in food-bearing trees and objecting to humans disturbing them.
Unless of course, by ‘bitten’ you mean ‘had her fingers pinched between the two halves of a coconut shell’?
Which seems unlikely because presumably:
(a) she would not need to use coconut shells to make fake hoof clip-clopping noises
(b) her hooves would not get pinched.
Unless one or the other of you were adopted, needless to say.
Perhaps a Coconut Crab? https://cdn-2.itsnature.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/coconutcrab1.jpg
*stealthily striking*
Is she now a were-coconut? o_O
Was he a limey?
What about Oreo’s? I knew a guy who turned into a cookie because a doctor accidentally dropped an Oreo into him.
https://www.ansemretort.org/ansemretort/index.html?comic=145 *this guy*.
_________
That said, I’m going with:
Fay Blood Mage (she looks like the Fay race on the council does), with either a male Troll body (if you google image Trolls DnD. That body looks close to some of the trolls in there.). Which’d be easier than using an Orcs body while farming a Troll for blood.
Thank you. I was wondering how long it would take for people to realize she said she *used* troll blood, not that she *was* a troll.
Funny, I was wondering how long it would take people to realize that she never said that at all.
What she actually said was:
Which is ambiguous, because it could easily mean that she had her 3/4 skull attacked to a troll body for the obvious regenerative benefits, or that she had her 3/4 skull attached to some other large humanoid body and used troll blood obtained elsewhere for use in her blood magic ritual of regenerative healing.
Well observed.
Was sure that DaveB mentioned it somewhere, but it has to have been made as a comment reply (if at all)
You have just successfully trolled.
So want to go …
“Sure she’s a troll,” he said, trolling.
::flicker his ears humorously::
”You are what you eat.”?
I r a cheezeburger?
Definitely cheesy.
Burger off!
Lol, not such a hot dog now!
Yorp is just being Frank
Is there anything in canon to support your assertion that the body under Sciona’s three-quarter-skull is an ork or an ogre, and most definitely not a troll? Because that body could easily be a troll body, given that we have not yet seen one in this universe and have no idea what they look like. I mean, it’s probably not a pixie body, but any large humanoid monster is pretty much fair game for speculation at this point. Lacking some clarification in the canon, of course.
Do you consider “Dave said so” to count as canon? Like, it’s fact, it just hasn’t (yet) been explicitly shown/confirmed in the comic.
Generally, across all genres of fiction, the story which has appeared in print (or on screen) is considered the core cannon. With author’s and script writer’s future plans having a lesser status. Depending on the fan community perhaps being not considered canon at all. Probably influenced by how much plans have been seen to vary from the published versions, in the past.
In Dave’s case he has reserved the right to change things that he has only mentioned in his blog, or in replies to comments, when it comes to actually committing to showing something in the comic itself.
This is a very sensible option, as it stops Dave from painting himself into a corner. A brief comment, in answer to a reader question may take a moment to consider. Whereas an ongoing story arc will have been developed over days, and any key point may have had hours worth of consideration as to its merits.
Therefore the way that the author may have viewed a particular motivation or mechanic as working, may not turn out to be viable, on deeper consideration.
On the plus side Dave does very much tend to keep to his initial comments, given that he has thought through very many aspects of his characters and setting long in advance. So many of the wrinkles have already been ironed out.
Therefore for most purposes it is sensible to treat his comments as canon. But we must accept that sometimes the printed version will vary. On the rare occasions that we see divergence though it tends to only be in subtle ways.
Maxima and everyone else was supposed to be reset as well but weren’t.
We, including Krona herself it seems, don’t know just how local the time loop was. It is possible that time has only reset for the current party (Krona, Pixel, Sydney, 1/5th of Harem).
So, Krona’s primary ability is Limited Wish (250 m radius), with no material components. Anybody outside the area of affect is, well, unaffected.
Angry troll may have been reset. From both Harem’s unexpected memory and Krona’s realization that she doesn’t know as much about her ability as she thinks, there are no guarantees. Sciona may know and is using the time to prepare/escape/whatever.
Well considering as she said, this is the first time she ever used it on some one other than herself which is providing new information about the sequence of events. Also new variables.
Love the look of panic,and frantic repair work on Krona’s face….
Same kind of panic look you get when messing about on puter and making small mistakes..
Kinda like when your keyboard has the / next the enter key and you do this
Sudo rm -r /
Instead of Sudo rm -r /stuff
That is such a design flaw in UNIX – It nearly screwed Pixar. Thompson & Richie screwed up on that one.
https://www.lug.wsu.edu/node/414
You have to remember that Unix started out as a little side project, more or less, for fun. It wasn’t really designed for what it became…
Not really. And even if it were the case, years of evolution followed. The fact that you can, as root, enter a command which destroys your system is a feature, not a bug. If you want a set of powerful tools it is foolish to hamper them with training wheels.
No one should be operating a computer without a backup or other means to recover from a disaster.
The gut-wrenching realization that you just bricked something important because you forgot about a loose wire.
Thankfully, that will not work. Linux, like other Unix derivatives, has a case-sensitive command line. sudo does not begin with a capital letter. Still, there are safer ways to do that.
Ahh the fun part when they find out they just reset the player, but the “corpses” are still hanging in the lair.
Basically only resetting them. Sciona gaining access to first reality Sydney’s balls so we get an all balls out super fight between Sydney and Sciona :p
Taking on an opponent with the same abilities (plus a few more) can be tricky. She won’t know how everything works though, or at least the details of how it works, like what the different buttons on the com ball do.
That would be an interesting callback to the opening pages. “Why was she so ready with solutions for the boss fight with KopyKraut?” … “Ohhhh.”
But Sydney knows how to use them. Or at least knows it better.
No, it’s a local loop, which means Sci-fright never met and gutted Sydney, and, even if she had, it would not be that easy to duplicate Sydney’s balls
Depends on how local. Local could mean anything from a solar system to a rooftop. Guess we’ll find out how localised it is when they next see their latest special friend.
Presumably Maxima is much less than a solar system away so the loop is a lot more localized than that.
The implication being that we don’t know how much further than that roof top gets reset when the checkpoint is triggered.
How local? Did it reset the scary, stabby psycho across in the Mars building or is she heading their way to investigate what is going on?
Trouble with local time loops, what about anyone entering or exiting the area? Does the former disappear and the latter make multiple copies of themself?
Further … small scale testing is in order.
we do not know. most cases seem to never have happened or worked out fine due to absolutely unknown reasons. Krona wouldn’t use something she knows will get her or others in major paradox trouble.
and she obviously has not checked her watch for the time when experimenting with this… which is kinda one of the first things one should do when playing around with time… now i am curious what kind of whacky logic is needed to explain that she never noticed…
is this… a plot hole? Do i get a cookie?
She’s not wearing a watch, and any device such as a smartphone or computer would immediately correct themselves to the right time so long as she had an internet connection. All it requires is for her to not check for a little bit and think she lost track of the time.
As to why the oven clock is suddenly wrong? Well, oven clocks have been unreliable in my experience, and it’s possible she doesn’t have one anyway, being able to reprogram reality makes a lot of simple tools potentially useless.
Incidentally, does anyone have the time?
Ah, never mind, there it is…
The fact it brought Bodie back, implies that, yes, it included the warehouse
Kronachrome did say that the loop has ended
Since it seems there is not a new Harem body (that she has become aware of) it implies the bodies of those involved have been reset and not duplicated.
I’m not sure if that implies the warehouse was included in the reset, or simply if the bodies of those within the initial effect radius have been reset. We’ll have to wait for future pages to see if Sciona remembers or not.
Harem was on the rooftop, and not deep in the tunnels below. An area that is a bit closer than Syd and Sciona and that Krona knew of the existence of when creating her save point.
No, Harem said she was just searching for Sydney in the warehouse when she was suddenly on the roof again.
Yeah, Bodie left before Sydney discovered her ability to BeePort
And more importantly, what about anyone that is both in and out of the loop (harem)
So I was correct when last week I said they’d have to reset their watches?
It´s nice to hear that someone still knows Populus (One of the epic god games.). A Game which would deserve to receive a modern graphics old gamemechanics remake.
To the comic – local timeloops can be extremly annoying – ask O’Neill and Teal’c, but at least they are starting at a roof – not at frootloops and a question you didn´d pay attention at the first time or a door to the face. Whats not to love about a comic that reminds you of so much other good stuff you have read or seen =)
Loved playing Populous on the old Amiga, it really taught you how to strategy after trying the same level ten+ times and barely getting your first knight by the time the AI started sending theirs (and it was a level where drowning the bastards didn’t work)
The fact that there are people who don’t know populus seems crazy to me.
I remember Populous from when I played it on the Commodore 64 (before the Amiga). Since then, I liked the first Black & White game (a more advanced godgame) better.
Loved Populous so much. Found a port of Populous some years ago and was totally excited… but they seemed to have made a mistake on the clocking.
Lost a game in less than 5 seconds. Over and over again…
You really should not port back in time. You are bound to get in a loop like that!
Originally, Populous was programmed for the old MS-DOS programming languages. Over time, computer processing got faster, but the programs did not take account for it, so they run the programs too fast. Best bet is to use a DOS Emulator, especially one that allows you to adjust how much processing cycles are used: I go with DOSBox. There are a few different versions of it & other websites have performance-reviewed & clarify instructions if the info included with the emulator seems a bit difficult. Best bet is to websearch DOSBox Emulator & find one that works best for you (they are mostly free downloads).
If you were to run DOSBox & set the parameters to your own comfort, it’ll slow down those old games so that you can actually play them again.
Sydney’s missing her glasses in panel 5.
I’m betting this isn’t as cut and dried as Krona thinks it is.
Probably fell off during her spaz attack last page, which just goes to show how scary Sydney can be: one minute she’s spazzing out, next second she’s all calm and focused
The problem with that is she had her glasses last panel. Guesticus above me may be right and her spaz attack probably made them fall off.
C’mon Pixel, don’t be mad. You did just get… saved… Oh wait, you don’t remember.
And I love Krona. Pure definition of unique, and also completely lost on her own abilities. Could she hack reality so that she becomes a super? Or that Sydney gets a fantabulous super’s body? And how permanent are her hacks? She must have undone her hair alteration.
Soooo many questions. Dabbler! Science us please!
Pixelicious is mad, because while Kronachrome saved her, but at what cost?
I would assume it’s pretty temporary as why not make yourself taller in her case at the very least?
Maybe she likes being short? Or is just scared at what she might mess up in her own body when doing more than some simple cosmetic changes?
That probably very likely. Her power is incredibly powerful, but without a user’s manual. Who knows what kind of horrific oopsies she may have done in earlier days trying to figure some things out. So with some tings she is being very cautious.
I get the feeling adjusting height would be a bit more complicated than just simply adjusting a bladder time variable.
oh that feeling when your code isn’t doing quite what you want it to
also p5 shouldn’t exclude be include ? (not sure on this one)
ERROR! ERROR! DOES NOT COMPUTE!
*compiling
*debugging
*compiling
*debugging
Yeah, I’m familiar with the concept. When I took computer programming, it was soooo…(expression of contempt)…1980’s.
Okay, guessing Bodie didn’t go inform Maxi, in which case, where did she go? o_O
Still there but standing just outside the border of the panel?
Except, we haven’t seen her since her spot of Deja Vu
In one of his blogs, some time ago, Dave said that he needed to cut down on the number of characters he drew per page. So we can expect some folks, without an active role on the current page, to be positioned out of frame.
Of course, with Harem, more than any other character, there is indeed the possibility that she has gone elsewhere. But we should not assume that as our default option.
Presently Harem is in a state of quantum flux, where she is both there and not there, until we get a clue one way or the other.
So in other words a case of Schrödinger’s
catHarem.Just like Sydney: a case of being there and being ‘out there’ at the same time
So problem with the localized time issue…. wouldn’t the fact that time went on as normal and subsequently any contacts or otherwise reliance on outside sources for any kind of input or other transmission kind of be a huge tip off that something was up and especially for our villain here? One does not simply just lose an hour or more while doing nothing but the standard mode of operations or otherwise magic in her case. Pretty sure a lot of timing and scheming are involved.
Given Sydney’s bladder clock, we know that the full loop took less than half an hour.
So, since Krona adjusted for, & reset, the local timeloop back to the point of the normal timestream, did that also reset the clock on Sydney’s bladder? Krona originally set Sydney’s bladderclock about 10 minutes before she set the Checkpoint, so Sydney would (theoretically) still have about 20 minutes left before her bladder gets insistent again.
I can almost imagine that Sydney did…relieve…her bladder when Sciona caught her back in the warehouse, but Krona’s “trigger point” brought Sydney back to the rooftop at a point before her pants were soiled…Which is why we don’t see Sydney embarrassed about it now.
;)
That’s a good question. Her brain didn’t get reset, but did she get dis-injured?
Well, if she didn’t get dis-injured, the whole point of the checkpoint would be lost, wouldn’t it?
But it does raise a question: What about mental trauma? Sydney’s hyperactivity might make her better equipped than most to deal with that, though.
Such antics are a coping mechanism. These allow folks to cope with a trauma in the moment, but, like any repression they are not resolving the underlying issues.
On the plus side Sydney has already recognised that she might have died (and possibly slowly and painfully, at that). She is just choosing to look on the light side of things. That is actually a helpful part of mental treatment. But it will take a lot more consideration, than just a momentary realisation, for her to resolve the negatives.
I would expect Sydney to have very disturbed dreams and nightmares, as that is when we naturally process such things. If she does not either work through the issues more thoroughly (with or without help) then she may start to suffer more of the symptoms of PTSD.
Where Sydney’s ADHD would likely help in the process is that she will consider it from various angles. Unfortunately the constantly shifting focus of attention will mean that she will then get distracted by something else.
As we can see above emotionally Sydney is finding it too hurtful to properly confront the issue. And that may not change, given her habitual use of play-acting as a coping mechanism. Every time it gets too painful, she will switch to some gag or other to avoid the issue again.
So Sydney may not apply the full power of her analytical ability to the problem. If it were an intellectual problem alone it would not be an issue. Throw emotions into the mix though and that is another matter.
Maybe the ‘little but often nibble at the problem’ approach might work. I am afraid that it may not though.
Harem is probably very disoriented if shes not in two different time periods simultaneously
Yes. With serious possible implications for her quantumly linked state. Possibly it is self-correcting, as each of her bodies do have different experiences constantly. However this is normally at the same time.
One aspect of her power, which may help, is the fact that when Harem puts one of her bodies in storage, it is effectively taken out of the time-stream. Thus the other four bodies continue to process experiences, whilst the stored one (presumably)* retains only those up until the moment that she went into storage.
This means that, upon being recalled, the stored Harem’s brain is instantly updated with all the shared experiences that the other four Harems have been up to. Possibly for a protracted period. From this point of view it is entirely analagous to updating information when time gets back into sync, after a loop.
However there is a serious complication. Normally the process is one-way. I.e. there is one Harem with out of date memories and four with new ones. All the extra memories, after a clearly-defined cut-off point are simply added to the retrieved Harem’s memories. Her brain, presumably instantly (as she experiences no disorientation, or amnesia) on return), lays down new neural pathways as appropriate for the extra memories.**
This time though there are four Harems with one set of shared experiences and one Harem who has gone through a loop and had different ones. Using the multi-worlds hypothesis she is actually a Harem from another timeline! She may not be able to sync with the local Harems. Their counterpart is actually on another timeline, searching a warehouse for Sydney.
In which case we have an interesting possibility. Perhaps the Harem here is still linked with that other timeline, so is sharing memories with them. But the two timelines will rapidly start diverging, with this call from Maxima. In that timeline Pixel and Sydney are captives and there is a crisis. And we can assume that at least one other Harem is in contact with Maxima.
So this Harem will be getting conflicting information. Here she is hearing a calm conversation of ‘there was a problem but it is resolved’ whereas her counterparts are being mobilised for a rescue operation. Conversely the other four local-timestream Harems are hearing the calm conversation but are linked to the Harem in the other universe, who is probably coming across Sciona around about now!
If however Harem’s super power does not transcend to alternate Earth timelines, then there is an alternative problem. Four Harems have one set of memories. One has another set. They are not quantumly linked. They are not even from the same universe!
We do have one solace. And that is Harem is just disquieted at the deja vu but is not panicking. Which she would do if she had no contact with her other selves. It is something which would be immediately apparent to her (the same as if we suddenly became blind). Failing to receive sensory information from her counterparts (even if she ignores most of it, from her local body perspective) is highly disturbing for Harem.
Which implies that the time-displaced Harem on the roof has managed to connect to her counterparts in this timeline. But instead of one brain being updated with new experiences (a simple matter of copying any one of the other four in its entiriety), there are two sets of new ones. And some of which conflict!
This means that the memories in the conflicting parts of the brain (which are physically the same bits, in many cases) are trying to be in two different states at once. Literally. Only those memories which get put into a different part of the brain, in each timeline, do not have this conflict.
Which is good because the processing of a routine mission would probably be handled by the left hand side of the brain. Whereas if emotions become involved, such as with a colleague being captured, then the right hemisphere gets brought into play. So Harem can have some clear memories of both timelines.
But others will be seriously messed up, wherever different information is trying to be laid down on the same sets of neural pathways. As this would have had to be resolved instantly, if her quantumly linked state has been maintained, then there could have been no mechanism for the brain to sort through conflicts and resolve discrepancies in the most logical way it could.
Instead her brain would essentially have to randomly decide pathway by pathway or atom by atom, which experience should be laid down. If they are virtually identical (e.g. walking down the same corridor) then it makes little or no difference. However if different routes have been taken and subsequent review of the memories jump between each at random, it will be highly disorienting.
All complicated by the fact that Harem has five sets of diverse experiences anyhow, so ten with the looped ones factored in! Even Harem is going to have difficulty with that!
* Possibly even the stored mind keeps getting updated, even whilst in storage. Putting aside the disturbing implications that her senses might be processing her being in a state of limbo, I don’t think the physics would pan out.
Time is a necessary element for change to occur. If you are in a state where time does not apply you cannot update something. Memories are laid down by physical changes to the brain. Which cannot occur if her body remains in an identical state from the moment it entered storage until it is recalled.
** To test this we could kill all the other four Harems just after the one is removed from storage. If her memories persist, despite their deaths (and assuming she does not die herself) then we know that brain is now in an identacle state to what theirs were.
This may be unethical however.
But it is not really necessary as it is how her power is described as working. The brains are quantumly linked. What happens to one must happen to the other. The fact that she continues to function even with going into suspended animation means that the power has a mechanism to adjust for that.
Then of course there are the other possibilities that Krona is currently exploring. That there was no time loop, per se, (even if just contained to a relatively small area or group of individuals) but the apparent effect was achieved some other way.
Depending on which it is, some of the above points will still apply, whereas others (such as the involvement of alternate Earth time-streams) will not.
I have some problems with this local time loop. If the loop is local how does it come that the whole area is not floating in space or moved inside the earth? And if its only affects the check pointed persons, I see a problem if someone bombed the building they are standing on.
Could be the area has been reset to a point relative to a larger area surrounding it.
The problem with the respawn point getting bombed or otherwise boobytrapped is something I mentioned a few pages back when I thought they did a ‘restore from back-up’ kind of reset, and it depends on just what has been reset at the checkpoint. If it was just their bodies, yes the building suddenly being gone underneath their feet is a problem. If the building itself is also included in the reset there is less of a problem.
Apparently it’s a reset, but not in time. This leads to many questions….
” how does it come that the whole area is not floating in space ”
The simple answer is that, yes, the Earth is the center of the universe as originally thought. Just don’t tell the Flat Earth Society people. They would get way too smug about it.
Well you can describe the rotations and positions of everything with the earth( or yourself) as center. We just decided to put something else at the center because the formulas get a lot cleaner and simpler if you take the star as reverence point. the planets don’t rotate around the sun. the planets and the sun rotate around a common center, that is inside the sun( because the sun is a lot heavier than the planets) but not its center and shifts with the constellation of planets.
Jupiter is so massive that jupiter and the sun orbit a point/barycenter just outside of the suns surface. Kind of like Pluto and its moon Charon.
But Pluto loves Charon. You can tell because Pluto keeps its heart on the outside too.
And here I always thought Pluto loved Mickey.
But Pluto is lord of the underworld…
is Mickey dead?
*mouth wide, in shock*
I realised pretty early on the problem with time travel as usually depicted, that if you emerged at the same point at a different time, while the Earth went through its normal motions, you’d end up in deep space. I accounted for that in my own time travel story at one point where my time machine was also a spaceship.
Then I learned about relativity, which threw an extra spanner in the works. Basically, there *are* no fixed points in space. If two spaceships pass each other, drifting through inertia alone, there’s no specific answer to which one is moving and which one, if either, is at rest. That also means that there is no specific point that could be said to be the “same” as where the time machine departed.
The only answer I could think of would be that as it travelled through time, it would also follow the same motion through the curved space as it would if it followed the time normally, which helps the idea that it would in fact still appear at the same point on the planet. Only, if it was resting on the ground to begin with, that would make it “fall” through the planet. Or… No, I think I’ll stop here.
I may not exactly have effected everything within the localized area. It may have only effected specific key events within the localized area, probably focused on key objects and people. Thus certain reference epoints would remain. Such for example, a door being open/closed. If the door was opened and the reset changed it state back to closed. Its relative position to the door-frame would not be effected by the reset or the frames relation to the building, and to the ground.
Sydenys position relative to the building roof was reverted back to the starting point when the way-point was set, but the building’s relative position to the ground was not altered. Fixed objects, being static are not altered by the way-point program, but variable objects within the effected area are relatively reset.
Did any of that make any sense?
Yes.
At some scale static things are not actually static. Due to the rotation of the earth, that building moves about 27km in a minute. Due to the earth’s motion around the sun, the building moves almost 2km in a minute. Due to the solar system’s motion in the galaxy, the building moves around 13km in a minute. and so on, and so on. So at some level, for them to still be on the roof of the building, it can’t be just a localized effect. Krona better be careful testing that. It would really suck to end up in vacuum (Ha!) because the earth moved out from under you.
Actually, BenLF, you’ve pretty well proven that the checkpoint MUST BE a local effect, with “local” being defined – both initially and for the later restore – relative to some physical object or objects not included in the area of effect.
If that were not the case, then the first time Krona set a checkpoint, waited a few seconds, and then triggered it, the room (building? rooftop? park bench?) she was in would be in an obviously different location – quite possibly up in the air or underground. Since she remains alive, and had never noticed such a thing, it didn’t happen.
How hard is it to keep her spots in the same place?
Or do you not bother?
You ever tried drawing a spotted or striped character from dozens of different angles and poses and making sure that every tiny spot was on the exact same place on their body?
I’m not trying to attack you, just trying to point out how hard it is to do that. Most artists that I know of with spotted characters try to keep a few distinguishable spots/stripes the same and fill in the rest randomly or with some kind of texture tool.
You’d need a 3d posing tool to keep the spots where they belong. Besides;she’s a magical creature. Maybe her spots migrate around her body!
Any volunteers want to check out that theory?
I’m willing, on one condition: she consents to the examination.
(Actually it wouldn’t be hard. Take photos of her in the same position on several occasions, and compare them carefully. Astronomers have, since the early days of photography, had techniques for efficiently comparing arrangements of spots in two photographs to see if anything is different. The main one: get the two photographs lined up so some “reference” spots are in the same apparent place in both, then use an apparatus to shift which one you’re looking at without any eye movement required – swiftly enough that the eyes can’t observe the process of changing. The result is that any spot which is in one photo but not the other will appear to blink, and we’re pretty good at noticing things that blink.)
I recommend braille.
I once knew a barmaid in Sails. On her chest was tattooed the prices of ale. On her behind, for the sake of the blind, was exactly the same, just in Braille.
Were-creature fur/pelt patterns actively shift.
DaveB does not rely on freehand alone. Various things can be drawn in to each scene, on demand. Halo’s orbs being a prime example. But whilst the orbs do rotate they can keep the same facing the the readers, all the time, without it causing bleating by critics.* Not so easy for Pixel’s spots though.
I think LordViking probably has it right, with the technique he detailed.
As for checking Pixel’s panther spots, I will pass. But would happily check her normal body, should she give permission, to see if Pixel does have any analogous markings. She does have those ones on her face, after all.
Purely for Science! of course.
* Incidentally, if Sydney ever figured this out, she could easily orient herself to the 4th wall, just by glancing at the orbs.
So… Maybe not time travel at all. Might just be a backup point. Time continues as normal, something happens, restore those you have backed up.
Potentially, this is leading to the Star Trek teleporter conundrum of “do you die and get replaced by a clone everytime time you use it?”
And, I was right. Totally local and they move forwards. Apparently I think like Dave. Is that a good thing? Do I get a cookie?
Well, if GrrlPower was affiliated with Marvel (which thankfully it’s not since Marvel is now affiliated with Disney), then you could have earned the legendary No-Prize.
No wait. The No-Prize is awarded to those who point out a problem or contradiction that was published, but also give a quasi-realistic or pseudo-scientific reason that justifies the apparent contradiction. Just being right is not a requirement that qualifies.
Sorry. You don’t get a prize after all.
Surely stack exchange would be more likely to have answers to all your reality hacking issues.
If they don’t, somebody on Stack Overflow will.
There is always someone out there who knows the answers
Do you get your armour save bonus because you can parry incoming attacks with your breath weapon? Or perhaps you just eat incoming attacks, be they physical or blue beam in nature?
It’s from the … uhm.. halitosis…
ya know, the uh,,,,
Suddenly I’m feeling very uncomfortable with this topic.
Yes
Cool, glad we narrowed that down.
*wags tail contentedly*
Glad to be of assistance
Called it 2 comics ago =D. I have to say, she definitely got the power jackpot
Yeah, but with the power jackpot comes loads of financial responsibility. Krona tries to be responsibly-minded in the use of the power, but there are too many unknown factors for which there are no mentors to teach her about the consequences in a safe & controlled manner.
Experience is a harsh teacher. She gives the test first & the lesson afterwards.
Critics: This power will break the setting! How will you explain why they don’t keep using it?
DaveB: They will never use it again because they now know this power could break their universe.
Brilliant!
“When you pull the pin, mister grenade is no longer your friend”
An old military axiom: Friendly fire…Isn’t.
common sense also isn’t
To be honest, the probability of the universe even noticing something like this are pretty slim.
In the words of Q from Star Trek (more or less):
Don´t worry. nothing you amoebas do will destroy the universe. (that was in relation to time travel and timeline f*ckuppery)
Destroying themselves as the universe self heals around their mess – yeah, that could happen.
Destroy is not the same thing as screw up…
Mordo might have some words with Krona…
Okay, I wonder what would happen if Krona’s bit interacted with a prophet from my setting. Prophets generally aren’t aware of what they are and what they do is subconsciously scan through multiple timelines and copy and paste bits of alternate timelines that make their worries and beliefs on how things will turn out more likely. (at least while unaware and subconscious they can’t actually affect free will, but they can cause a person to have thoughts that might not otherwise have had…whether they disregard those or not is another matter).
“Always in motion, is the future.”
~Yoda
The prophecies of the future are not the same as “being set in stone.” The prophecy is like knowing a particular “if/then” statement about the universe – ie: If (this happens), then (that) will follow. By knowing the if/then statement, one can take action to ensure that “if” doesn’t happen…Which means “then” will not happen.
But knowing the “if/then” statement is not enough, by itself. One must also be aware enough of how the universe actually works in specific patterns, or how Cause & Effect works in order to have any idea what will happen from a different action, in accordance to those Natural Patterns.
So was that a Yoda product placement for “Future Laxitives”? Or does he hold shares in “Future Plumb Cannery”?
In the RPGs I run, a prophecy is a recipe – if you can make these thing happen, those things can come to be.
The problem is that anyone with the recipe can screw with it – and mistaking baking soda with baking powder can really mess things up, as does adding chocolate chips to your omelette.
But if the recipe is for a plain omelette, and you add cheese, do you end up getting a more favourable result, than the prophecy predicted? i.e. Same basic outcome but with something extra that was not mentioned.
Mmm… it depends. If the recipe doesn’t call for cheese and you’re assuming it ends up being an omelette but it ends up being cookies or perhaps steak tartar with an whipped egg glaze…
Let’s just say that deliberately mucking about with what a Power wants is a great way to become the object of its wrath and leave it at that…
On the plus side, the Power opposite the first Power’s bailiwick might reward you for your help – although that Power’s idea of “reward” might not jive with your own…
Ahh, you did not mention that you were following a chef’s recipe under their supervision. I would not want to piss off Gordon Ramsay even if Nigella Lawson did give me a nice smile for making him mad!
Well, maybe not. OK she does have a very pretty smile. Maybe.
This power you are talking about…. is she single? And cute?
In Scion, I always had Prophecies show the moment of crisis but left a lot of details unclear. The thing they prophesied WOULD happen but their actions would determine a lot of the impact of that action. Thus a prophecy of an atomic bomb going off in a WWII game turned out to be about a test-bomb rather than anything targeted at a population and then villain making use of that energy had it used against them.
Yea I used to do the same thing in a table-top campaign I ran. It is quite easy to have a prophecy invariably fulfilled, if you are the only one writing a story. But if you have pesky players trying to wriggle out of their destiny it would become a whole lot harder, if you did not stack the deck with tricks like that.
In that campaign I did manage to keep prophecy immutable (organically, rather than with a big hammer). And my players had no doubt about my ability to continue ensuring that. They knew that their best bet was to ensure that they did not fulfil the criteria to be part of the prophecy,* if an opportunity presented itself. As I like players feeling that they have free will I did present such. Once.
* Clearly only possible if their involvement was not mandated in the prophecy. If the bearer of a title is mandated to be affected, then giving up the title, to someone else, is a legitimate way of wriggling out of destiny. Of course you need to find someone willing to accept that role. Which if an ominous prophecy is widely known may not be very easy. But that is all part of the roleplaying experience.
Really, whether a prophecy was set in stone would depend on whether either time is truly linear (i.e., everything is predestined, even if we don’t know how) or otherwise, when time is truly a branching thing with no predestination, it was a strong or a weak prophesy. A strong prophesy would make a universal statement about all possible future timelines, a weak prophesy would make a conditional statement that effectively only ends up being significant for some timelines. It’s basic temporal logic (and the difference between several different models of temporality). The strongest forms of prophesy would also state that the triggering conditions would inevitably happen at some point.
The common interpretation of prophesy is pretty strong, but that’s likely a mistake. Weak prophesies are pretty common in reality; we effectively use them all the time.
Arrgh! I hate questions like this. Not for being asked, but because they remind me that I had the opportunity to find out, and did not take it!
Darn my weakness for pretty girls’ smiles!
*bangs head against wall, hard*
Prophecy in the Divine Blood setting don’t really predict the future, they edit it. For example, one has a subconscious worry that X topic they don’t understand well is most of what is on the coming final. Their prophecy looks at all the various futures and finds one that matches the prophet’s worries and pop, the test now matches their worries. The teacher might look at it be confused because they remember writing a different test, but eventually pass it off as being a fluke of memory. A less pessimistic prophet might be absolutely sure the coming test was going to be all about things they understood well and the same thing would happen.
In game play, we had a prophet in the first playtest and this caused things like their love-interests suddenly being on the serial killer’s target lists, clues that weren’t dropped by said killer in this timeline being found when the prophet moved a chest of drawers to look behind it, an electro-magnetic lock glitching as they tried to get into a hidden lab, both of the prophet’s love interests appearing at the same time and starting a Betty-Veronica squabble…etc…
I don’t think I ever told the player just how many odd things came about because she mentioned in passing to the other players that she was worried about X or Y happening.
That said, oracles work like the Yoda quote suggests.
An oracle in Divine Blood would see the future of themselves, a person, or place in front of them (or they could look to the back), but they only see the future that would have happened before they saw it. Thus, the more dependent on their own actions that a result is, the less likely it is to happen.
An oracle seeing a particular die roll would likely end up rolling a different number because their state of mind changes producing minor changes in how they roll the die. As such, even practiced oracles don’t do well on craps but if they can remember to check dates they can reliably guess numbers for upcoming lottery draws, though most have difficulties trying to get anything more than one of the lesser prizes.
What the hell, I was only going to show this to Dave, but here:
https://sta.sh/0125bk76ten6
maybe I should just take that out of stash.
In any case, I generally avoid major time-shenanigans in my stories and game-play. I’ve had one prophet in gameplay (wait, the prophet from the fiction cameo-ed in recent playtest, so that’s two) and in the fiction there’s one prophet and about five Eternals though it’s more appropriate to say that there are pieces of five Eternals that aren’t consciously aware they exist in multiple timelines.
Sounds like an easy exploitable system once one of your ‘oracles’ catches on
Shades of The Vision of Escaflowné there…
A few pages back I mentioned two ways I thought the checkpoint could be working.
1) A restore from back-up in local time.
2) Complete time reversal.
Correct me if I misunderstood, but does it sound like Krona was thinking she did a time reversal but actually was doing a restore?
(I kinda hope it is this since I liked option 1 more than option 2.)
Krona was thinking (2), but got (1). She has no zero baseline to compare with, and this could of gone a lot worse…
The truly worrying bit is that this is the most thoroughly checked code she uses , yet she still didn’t know what it really did.
She thoroughly checked that one aspect. Whereas Krona would have been better off examining the entirety, to the same standard. Then getting it thoroughly bug-tested by a suitably competent team.
Whilst there are no other reality-hackers, to check with, if her code is similar enough to either computer programming or magical spell programs then she can have experts at either (or both) giving her constructive feedback. In addition to examining her code (with her help to learn the idiosyncrasies of the language).
Even if they are too dissimilar, for that to work well (and we must note that they will not be able to run the code themselves to error-check), then they, and/or specialist theorists, can still debate the basic principles with her. As Pixel is doing here.
She could have written her code to do just as described, and understood perfectly what it was supposed to do, but if there was some unknown variable thrown in or a limit to her abilities it could have defaulted to do something that looked like what she wanted but not exactly the same.
And that is why in proper programming you should always consider what should happen if you get an unexpected value for your parameters, because even if it should always be what you expect you will want to know what happens if it isn’t.
Tinkering with the fabric of reality is fun. I think Dabbler would approve.
The last scrub who did that nearly gamma-rayed everyone to death, and got a Dabbler fist bonk. Krona needs a Dabbler fist bonk and an lecture about destabilizing reality. Dabbler does screw around in many uses of that word, but generally seems to react badly when things can go catat catastrophically wrong.
Mmm, a fisting from Dabbles, yes please!
Additionally, this particular tinkering caused the T&A to unhappen, and Dabbler never approves of that.
Dabbler probably does not actually know about that (endorsement notwithstanding). But I approve, so will not mention it to her.
Cell phones would reset, wristwatches probably wouldn’t. My question is what happens to people/things that cross the boundary on a reset? If a person left the “local” area and there was a reset, would there be two of you? Or would the second look show you disappearing?
And what if you ENTERED the boundary? Would you disappear?
THIS is the problem with not having a “Help” system on your programming language!
I’d think it was the opposite. Cell phones are connected to all kinds of outside sources, but wristwatches are mostly standalone devices (unless it syncs itself via satellite or something else). So a phone would update itself to current time when noticing it is out of sync, the wristwatch keeps on ticking like nothing happened till you manually adjust it.
My bad for not being clear – I meant “reset” as in “reset to the proper time when the time bubble bursts.”
In the case of someone leaving the area of the “local reset” being duplicated, I think that it would be dependent on if that specific person was specifically included in the setting conditions of the reset. I would tend to think that, since Krona didn’t know about Sciona being in the area, then Sciona wasn’t included in those parameters & didn’t get reset. In this case, Sciona probably got a bit confused when Sydney suddenly disappeared, right out from her grasp.
Remember that only 1/5 of Harem was included in Krona’s parameters & Harem (still getting “updates” of the memories from her other 4 parts) still gave this Harem a sense of deja vu as those memories updated. As we’ve seen before, not even Sydney’s shield (which blocks magic & even Harem’s teleport ability) still doesn’t break Harem’s “mental quantum link” between them. Apparently, even a short time-shift doesn’t break Harem’s mental link between bodies.
You forgot that strung up pixel who is no-longer strung up. So id Scion didn’t get reset, that’s 2 bodies that vanished on him. On the other hand, as an interactive element to the two who were specified, he may have been incidentally included as a floating variable?
Sciona is a her, not a him.
The other thing to consider is that the ‘local area’ may well include the warehouse. We have nothing to indicate that it was restricted to purely the people present at the checkpoint. In fact it may have included half the country and it just happened that Maxima and at least one Harem was outside of the time bounce area.
Of course if it is that vast, then there will be serious repercussions. So let us hope that it is just the industrial estate at most. That way Scionia would not have any memories of the event, and the team will have a significant intelligence advantage.
Besides that, Pixel was specifically included when Krona set the parameters; Sciona wasn’t because Krona didn’t know Sciona was there in the first place. We may see that Sciona (& the other two victims) were not reset & that Sciona still has full memory of what happened…And even now be preparing to deal with the “suddenly disappearing Pixel & Sydney.
I have a sudden feeling that the reply to the check in call is going to be:
Krona: Uh, everything’s under control. Situation normal.
Max: What happened?
Krona: Uh, we had a slight universe malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
Max: We’re sending a squad up.
“We’re fine! But Maxima, would you kindly nuke the neighboring building from orbit? Kthnkxbai!”
Wait, what’s that Mr. Welch? “840. Even if it would have immediately solved the last six adventures, I won’t throw dynamite in every well I come across.” Drat.
I suppose we do actually want to clear the facility and rescue the hostages.
Another military maxim: “When in doubt, grenade it out.”
The thing here is that there is no doubt that there are hostages inside the warehouse along with the big-bad villain…That means the ‘ol “nuke-em from orbit” option just gets pulled off the table.
+5 for referencing the inestimable Mr. Welch and his list.
Krona, after stomping on her communicator: “It was a stupid conversation anyway.”
Krona: Uh, we had a slight universe malfunction, but uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
Max: (appearing, as if from nowhere): WHAT‽
(Sonic boom blending seamlessly into Max’s shout and adding reverberation)
Shouldn’t the “exclude” in panel 5 be “include”?
I know that Krona thinks in terms of computer programming, but this is a lot easier to process when you think of it in terms of gamesaves/console commands.
There’s a small difference between picking out a program on your home computer, and a mainframe that controls a large corporation. She needs to take classes at Dabbler U. …
Ah, I see. Krona’s trick has absolutely nothing to do with time. She just manipulates energy/matter on a massive scale. She records the position of all energy/matter within a certain diameter relative to earth’s gravity well (you know, so they don’t end up in space). This recording is set to overwrite the current reality of said diameter when certain conditions are met. In this case, the stress level of one of them. When the trigger occurs, a macro is set into motion modifying part of the recording. The macro overwrites the triggering party’s recorded memories with her current memories.
This seems like a very powerful and dangerous ability. Just not one that manipulates time at all.
I like that explanation far better than local time loops. They always give me headaches. But Krona should know if she had written a macro that does exactly this.
Not necessarily. E=mc². Krona may have thought she was manipulating one part (time is bound up in c as part of the ‘speed of light’), but was actually altering the other aspects, to achieve a superficially similar result.
Intimately related to what I said last time, but still far more manipulation required than if its just local to the prime actors. So those four (presuming Krona included herself) get bounced back to the start with a memory backup/update and “know” what would have happened if they hadn’t been pulled out by Krona’s reset.
If that is what Dave is implying happened, a very annoyed Sciona is now scanning for Halo and company.
The other alternative proposed, by a shrewd commentator, is that the only thing which happened was memories being changed. Hence Sydney (and Harem) had a vision of what would happen if they continued down the route they were on.
This was prior to the current comic mind, with the revelation that time has progressed for Maxima and the rest of the world.
So a modification of that proposal is as follows. Those present at the checkpoint were placed in a mental simulation, which replicated the world (or perhaps just the local area). This ran through in real time. I.e. each minute in the simulation took one minute in the real world, there was no time compression or looping involved.
To outside observers they would have just been in a trance, whilst still standing on the rooftop.* The recall trigger that Sydney activated simply ended the simulation. Time has passed, in accordance with the outside world. Harem did think she was scouting for Sydney, in the warehouse. But is now suddenly ‘back on the roof’. Although, of course, she never actually left it.
Krona thought she was manipulating reality but all she was doing was creating a sandbox that replicated it. This is similar to how her ‘predictive text’ might work. It replicates Sydney, and the present local environment, but runs through a few seconds ahead of the current conversation. Updating Krona with what Sydney is likely to say. But not actually peering into the future, to achieve that.
However if Krona believed that her power was letting her see the future, and modified that capability to ‘create a time loop’ then we can see how she would actually be creating a simulation of the same.
CCTV footage (or gameboy readings) may or may not help to resolve this. If the simulation was purely mental then the devices will show that they never left the spot. If the simulation was recreating all the sensory input, then cameras may well have picked up the simulated environment too. Likewise if the gameboy was acting as a webcam.
Telemetry could be fooled by the simulation, as it relies on sensory input to work. Even satellite data purportedly coming in from outside the simulated area could be appear to show the correct information as per the simulation, rather than the outside world.
Where Archon might have been able to pick up discrepancies is if it (hopefully) does not purely rely on the information coming from their devices but independently checks their location by triangulating their signal position. Alarm bells should have been ringing to say that there was a difference between where their GPS devices thought they were and their actual triangulated position.
Likewise any CCTV, that was outside of the effect, would show the real situation. Although it might be difficult to resolve them on a distant rooftop.
* Thus this is a very dangerous thing to have done in sight of enemy territory!
If the technology does not immediately help, the best clue to if this hypothesis is Sydney’s bladder.
Pixel seems unusually concerned with the safety of causality for someone in this kind of narrative. Most folks who encounter some form of temporal manipulation aren’t usually so panicky about the state of reality. They’re all “whee! Time travel!”
Pixel is a dangerous ancient relic expert, no telling what kind of things she’s had to deal with over the years…
Good point. She’s probably seen stuff that’s rendered areas uninhabitable if you don’t want to wake up a different shape than you went to bed as.
I would think that, at this point, Pixel should be regarding Krona herself as a “magical artifact, potentially capable of extreme danger.” Unlike Sciona & fortunately for Krona, Pixel is unlikely to consider surgical methods to “study” Krona…
O.o
Pixel has laser claws, of course she considers that option. For every problem. She probably sighs internally every time she has to discard ‘Plan A’, for moral reasons.
So what’s next for Sydney and the others???
“What’s next?” is a relative term when time paradoxes come into play.
Live beta testing is such fun.
the “Killer” error handling routine of the universe, is called a black hole.
They tend to form and KILL those who tinker too much.
depending on the universe you can also be devoured alive, piece by piece by beasts that have no physical form that travel from a parallel timeline that is angled rather than curved, Krona might want to keep away from rooms with sharply angled corners from now on as a result of that.
Also worth noting, singularities are a construct of limits in calculus, and don’t always reflect anything particularly fantastic in the real world. Passing the speed of sound is a singularity – Prandtl–Glauert singularity. The prediction of infinite air density doesn’t pan out, you just change state and different equations apply.
I bet you are looking forward to the imaging of the stuff around the predicted black hole, at the centre of our galaxy.
*wags tail in a singularly good fashion*
Sometimes explosively. See “evaporation, Hawkings” in particular the temperature/mass relation.
Uh-oh! Risk of an “Execute operator immediately” error?
But if reality has a ‘fabric’, shouldn’t that be “tailoring” rather than “tinkering”?
^_^
“By the warp and weft of the woven worlds!” as one character who appeared in several issues of Dr Strange used to say…
Looks like now it’s time to call maxima for backup
And to go rescue the corpses in the basement.
And hope the villian also got reset.
Yes Krona you should feel bad. Stop digging around in root-level processes like causality. No one really wants to find out what a Kernel Panic for Reality looks like. Stick to local settings and Object (people, clothing, hair) calls. You don’t want to piss off the big SysAdmin in the sky.
I just love that. also we probably do not want to see what happens when reality has a complete system crash and need sot be rebooted.
ctrl-alt-del…
I wonder what three analogous things Krona has to push, to activate that? Presumably they are deliberately set to be hard to reach and remote from one another.
She needs to talk to someone about this. There are no experts for sure, but there are people who can come up with test cases to experiment with and locations which can be made as safe as possible for testing. There shouldn’t be a need for her to do it all herself.
Yeah just because she’s the only one who can run the code doesn’t mean she’s the only one who can think about it.
Just be very cautious about how many, their security clearance and any conflicts of interest.
I suspect that she will get a number of requests to ‘change the property on this bar from “lead” to “gold”.”
“Strictly for test purposes, of course!”
Why bother? Just change the winning numbers on Powerball.
Because that is cheating. As Krona is a Vi and all such have real world law-enforcement roles, in addition to their supernatural one, it would be unethical. In addition to the immorality of depriving the actual winners of their returns.
Krona doesn’t know how to make a universe in a box YET.
Even a local time loop has problems. Many of which have already been mentioned.
Even if all she’s doing is resetting the people checkpointed to their previous states, there are real issues.
It’s a somewhat interesting quirk of the narrative, because a different kind of story could support the time loop without much issue. With enough narrative momentum and handwaving, you just roll with it. One of Grrl Power’s premises is thinking critically about powers. It’s the first thing the comic presents (lasers and transparent force fields).
What’s curious about Krona is that while she has no other reality hackers to compare code with, the issue of time travel, it’s implications and it’s consequences has been thought about a lot. There’s a wealth of fiction and and a great deal of theoretical discussion. You’d think she might have skimmed the highlights.
” There’s a wealth of fiction and and a great deal of theoretical discussion.”
And I think that’s exactly where Krona is making mistakes…She has nothing but examples of fiction & theoretical discussion to rely upon for learning. What she learns from actual practice is apparently running in with conflicts to some of that fiction & discussion.
Indeed, maybe Krona may only be resetting the physical state of the subjects without, while thinking that time travel is being involved. That would mean that her power is affecting less than she thinks it affects.
Ooops. Change “may only be resetting the physical state of the subjects without, while thinking that time travel is being involved” to say:
“may only be resetting the physical state of the subjects without involving actual time travel, while only thinking that time travel is being involved.”
I like that interpretation, it’s more in-line with the rest of her abilities and it avoids the problem of resetting time for only a chunk of the Earth while the rest keeps on rotating.
I agree as well, especially since a local time shift is likely to end up duplicating or annihilating people who move in or out of the area.
That and the earth movement, even though most time travel plots completely ignore the fact that planets move, or even that their tectonic plates move.
Sure, but consider the response this comic got.
Krona could have gone to a number of internet forums and asked questions, posed the scenario as a story, etc. and gotten a number of reasons as to why what she thought she was doing was a bad idea. Even merely discussing the theory with her fellows would have provided her more insight than she apparently had (see for example Pixel’s reaction).
As to the actual practice she’s had in using her checkpoint, consider this: it appears to have been so minimal that she never used a cellphone, listened to the radio, or checked the time online after using it. In fact, it seems she never used her checkpoint after a couple of hours and then looked out a window, or used it while outside, or used it near sunset or… any of a number of ways that would very obviously display that time kept on moving. Her current reaction makes sense only if she’s done almost no testing whatsoever, or if this is the first time she’s ever actually activated the checkpoint.
There’s a programmer joke I’ve heard, “I don’t always test, but when I do, I test in prod.”
Just to note while state resetting is less problematic than actual time travel, it’s still got problems. What happens to objects that happen to have moved into the space that the state reset people are going to occupy? Air might compress, but solid objects, people? What happens if the party was in a vehicle when the checkpoint was made (let’s say a public bus)? Assuming the vehicle gets reset with the party, what happens to it’s current occupants (presumably it might have picked up other passengers before the reset)? And that ignores the whole host of issues caused by planetary movement, etc. that others have mentioned.
Don’t forget the intense secrecy those behind the Veil are required to keep. Yes she could do some of the things you suggest, but if she overdoes it then she could be considered to be risking breaching the secret. Which has extreme, bottom-impaling consequences….
That may explain why Krona gained her first-hand knowledge that the recall works. And may have encouraged her to avoid repeating such internet research.
And now that she knows the time-bounce only removed her local data, she may want to check to see ihow incriminating the remaining stuff on the net is, and whether the inquisition are likely to be able to join the dots to her (the locally wiped data, and thereby lack of definitive proof, might be what has kept the spikes away from her bottom, for the moment).
the way I see it, Krona included only the members of her team to be a part of the parameters she set up in the first place. Anybody else would neither be reset or lose memories because they weren’t configured in with the reset.
We can probably figure that Sciona remembers everything during that time-frame & is now preparing for any other intrusions.
Okay. So only the members of the team are part of the parameters. After the checkpoint, someone who wasn’t part of the steam stands in the same spot that Pixel was occupying and waits. The checkpoint is activated. Pixel returns to where she was standing. What happens to the person who stood in her place?
Or, Krona checkpoints while driving at 60 mph down the highway (Hey kids, don’t type on your virtual keyboard and drive.). She only sets as parameters her team in the car. Sometime later, the checkpoint activates. Krona and the rest of her team appear in the middle of the highway, without a car, moving at a speed of 60 mph. Ignoring the likely presence of other vehicles, that seems hilariously dangerous to Krona herself.
The memory reset is actually something I’m curious about. Krona has the ability to preserve memories across the timeline (Sydney’s stayed because she triggered the point). Why only Sydney? Why wouldn’t you let everyone remember what they were doing before hand?
Personally I think that resetting everything in the local area (a bubble of reasonably large size, centred on the checkpoint) is more likely. Yes that would still have the potential for weirdness, such as for how do you deal with things that were in the bubble initially but not at the time of the reset, or vice versa.
However the circumstances under which Krona will likely have used the recall in the past and the likelyhood of various types of anomolies (such as we saw with Harem and Math) makes the verion I am proposing more likely to have appeared as full-on time control, so far.
It would be pretty obvious, for example, if Krona had ever previously used it to escape harm, caused by intelligent being, if the individual retains knowledge of the event. Their behaviour to her would be radically different, and she is clearly astute enough to pick up on that. As Krona had no suspicions that there were problems I think it points away from the ‘individuals present at the checkpoint only’ theory.
Although the option of it creating an accurate ‘virtual simulation’, just for the members present at the checkpoint does not have this problem, as only a virtual copy of any antagonist would take part, so the real version would be blissfully unaware of the events, reset or not.
“The memory reset is actually something I’m curious about. Krona has the ability to preserve memories across the timeline (Sydney’s stayed because she triggered the point). Why only Sydney? Why wouldn’t you let everyone remember what they were doing before hand?”
One thing to bear in mind is that Krona is unique, in a faction on her own, and I get the impression that she is used to operating solo too (from how she refers to her previous use of the power).
If you make a single-player game, your coding can be very different to that for a multi-player one. Even if you leave in the option of converting it later, various of the design choices you make will be different.
I think that is the case here. Krona only used the power for herself previously and, not being part of a team, at that time, did not code it to handle anyone other than herself retaining their memories. This would actually be a sensible feature, under those circumstances, for various reasons.
One example being that it would massively simplify programming, in not having to determine who is friend or foe. Clearly you would want friends to remember and enemies to not. However this is a non-trivial thing to try and determine, in advance of an unknown event, in a program. Which can be avoided completely by the means we have seen that she used.