Simon_Jester wrote:Not in this setting. If sea levels had risen thousands of feet in recent history it would show in the geological record. And in this setting, that can reasonably be interpreted to prove that it didn't happen.
Not to mention flooding, assuming it really happened, may well have seemed like the whole world ending to whoever preserved the flood story in oral tradition, but in reality was just a local event.
You could still have an "ocean dump" from Heaven occur in some area that lead to the flood story, and still not show up in the geological record.
Edit. A further thought is, if the Mediterranean was once dry land, Heaven could have flooded it by "dynamiting" the Straits of Gibraltar open, allowing the Atlantic to flood the entire area. That would certainly have seemed like the end of the world.
Another name crossed off a list, another contact dismissed as a meaningless acquaintance. More time wasted, more effort unproductive. Lemuel-Lan-Michael had heard that on Earth, human police were sometimes called "flat-feet" and now he understood why. His feet ached and his wings were stiff, all for nothing. And it was all the responsibility of the bottle of elixir that he'd found during the arrest of Ishmael. If he hadn’t been so attentive to his duty, he could have avoided all this. Perhaps his instincts had been wrong, perhaps the bottle was associated with the First Conspiracy. That's what he had decided to call the network that was split up into cells.
He shook his head, every instinct he had said that the bottle wasn't part of that group. The first few discrete arrests had confirmed his initial impressions, the First Conspiracy was all about doctrine and beliefs. After adequate 'persuasion', the detainees had confessed to spreading heresy and blasphemy. They had maintained their loyalty to The One Above All though, claiming that He had been led astray by misguided and corrupt advisors and if those advisors could be swept away, The Eternal Father would see how he had been mislead and everything would be made right. Lemuel was prepared to bet that the leaders intentions were quite different but that's what the lower ranks thought and a bottle of elixir just didn't fit with that pattern. There had to be a Second Conspiracy.
He flung the door of the slum open. Like the one he and his agents had raided earlier, this one was of better quality, made of wood rather than straw-reinforced mud. He looked down at the human female who was cowering against the wall at the opposite end of the entrance. By Inviolable Rule, all structures had to be large enough to allow the entry of Angels and that requirement diminished her apparent size still more.
"You are Almedha?" Lemuel read the name from his list. "Daughter of Brychan?"
"I am, Noble One." Her voice was quivering, whatever the humans had expected when they were granted access to Heaven, it wasn't what they had found. 'Salvation' consisted of eternal menial servitude to the Angels, a group who regarded the humans as being of little account and even less value. "How may I be of service to you?"
"I wish to discuss with you, some matters of importance. In particular, your relationship with a human called Ishmael."
That comment struck home. The woman was still frightened of him but now there was something else in her attitude, a guardedness, a determination not to reveal anything. "I know of nobody by that name."
"Do not lie to me, Almedha, daughter of Brychan. Lying is a sin and one that brings down punishment upon you. Do you want to experience the punishment that the League of the Holy Court deems appropriate for those who lie to it?"
"No peerless one. But I know not of any called Ishmael."
Lemuel-Lan shook his head sadly. "Your deceit means I must caution you again and in doing so my patience with you grows thin. I must tell you, Ishmael was arrested not so long ago by agents of the League of the Holy Court and he has made a full confession. He has admitted to apostasy, blasphemy, to heresy and sacrilege and to crimes so black that they have no name."
"No! He . . . " Almedha tried to stop herself but it was too late.
"And how would you know if you had never met him?" Lemuel landed the verbal blow quietly and deftly but its effect was still shattering. Almedha slumped back against the wall, her face white. Even so, her jaw was thrust out with her determination not to say anything. Lemuel sighed quietly to himself,why were humans so obstinate? He needed to look around this house but it was obvious he couldn’t leave Almedha free to leave. There really was no choice. He took a golden set of shackles from his belt, fastened a cuff around one of her wrists and another around a convenient post. As he left her to search the house, it never even occurred to him that he'd left her with her feet barely touching the floor.
The house itself was remarkably devoid of interest. Before their deaths, 'saved' humans had made much of the alleged virtues of simplicity and abstinence. On reaching Heaven they found out that those 'virtues' were greatly overrated, especially when they lasted for eternity. The fact that the Angels didn't share their opinions hadn’t helped much either. The fact was, that while the angels lived in unparalleled luxury, the fate of the 'saved' was one of eternal grinding poverty. Again, the irony there never entered Lemuel's consciousness, nor did any thought that the situation could, in any way, be considered unjust. Lemuel methodically searched the rooms, turning up nothing other than the few paltry possessions he'd expected. Finally he checked out the kitchen and there he found what he had been looking for. A small jar, one labelled 'McCormick Granulated Garlic'. Another Earth elixir.
"And how do you explain this?"
Almedha shook her head, she couldn't have answered even if she'd wanted to. Her mind was concentrated on ways of taking the strain off her wrist. Lemuel shook his head sadly and released the cuff from the sconce it had been attached to and dragged her towards him. "It pains me that you should be so obstinate. You leave me no choice but to take you to the League of Holy Court."
Interrogation Chambers, League of the Holy Court, Eternal City
Lemuel-Lan-Michael pushed Almedha into the room. The two interrogation specialists jumped to their feet as he entered. " At ease," he said. "We need some information from this one."
It took slightly longer than he expected. By the time Almedha broke, the interrogators had run through three buckets of water, her face and hair were saturated and she was choking amid a barrage of deep, racking coughs. It took her some minutes to get the story out, but when she did, it would have been mundane were it not for its significance. Ishmael had brought her the garlic as a gift. She had found the plain, bland food available to humans in Heaven dull to the point of being unpalatable and the garlic had seasoned it to provide a touch of interest. Lemuel shook his head, humans didn't even have to eat, let alone want anything more than plain gruel. Why would seasoning be so important to them?
"Are you finished with her?" One of the interrogators nodded towards the sobbing woman secured to the table.
"For the moment, yes. We'll keep her detained for a while." The interrogators nodded at each other and Lemuel caught a glimpse of their eyes. There was something there, something that reminded him of a sight long, long ago. It took him time to place it but when he did, the memory shook him. The look in the interrogators' eyes had been the same as that in the eyes of daemons taken prisoner in the war so many millennia before. That caused him to think a single, unmentionable question. Were there daemons in Heaven, even though they looked like Angels?. And then that led to another question. And was he one of them?
Lemuel-Lan-Michael left the interrogation chamber and went off down the long corridor that would, eventually, take him back to the surface, his mind troubled by the questions inside it. Halfway towards the first junction he thought he heard a human woman screaming from the interrogation chamber he had just left but he dismissed it. Just the strange sounds that filled this place sometimes, a product of wind and tunnels through stone.
Conference Room, DIMO(N) Headquarters, The Pentagon, Washington
"And now we have a problem with dates."
"How do you mean?"
"From what we have been able to learn, the Great Celestial War took place some four and a half to five million years ago. But, the information we have from Luga speaks of fighting on Earth and the legends of that remaining in human memory as folk tales. That means they must be much more recent than that.
"Simple explanation. Luga's lying. It's not as if that's an entirely unfamiliar concept to her. She tries to play us all the time. To be honest, its so much part of her nature than I doubt if she's even aware that she's doing it. Playing to the audience to get her way and turn things to her advantage is what she does. That's why she's such a hit on network television."
"Just like a few other so-called stars I can think of." Colonel Paschal spoke reflectively. "It might he worth checking through some of their antecedents and see if we come up with any demonic connections."
"Would you like the job? Or are you still in thrall to our Luga?" Doctor Surlethe put the question with a bouncing lack of tact.
"I told you, I didn't. . . . " The denial was interrupted by a barrage of coughing around the room. Paschal sighed to himself, he was never going to live this down. "Oh, never mind."
A satisfied and slightly triumphant chuckle replaced the coughing. "I don’t think the history of the performing arts is useful at this time, anyway, the fact that the daemons knew virtually nothing about us suggests that any contact they had with us in the last three or four centuries must have been cursory in the extreme."
"I agree." General Schatten nodded as he spoke. "Anyway, Colonel Baylor picked up on the time discrepancy. He tasked Luga with it and she confirmed that the Great Celestial War took place from about five million years ago, when Satan tried his coup-de-main assault on Heaven. An assault that came very close to succeeding by the way, he actually broke into the Eternal City but his Army was pushed out by Michael-Lan-Yahweh. It ended, sort of, about half a million years later with both sides too exhausted to fight on. In our terms, it's pretty obvious Satan actually won that war, he got his independent kingdom which was his objective all along. However, fighting went on for a long, long time after that. Not the live-or-die, win-or-lose fighting there had been in the Great Celestial War but more like border skirmishing. That ended abruptly, about 60,000 years ago and its from then that our folk-memories of the war originated."
"Why did it end so abruptly?" Colonel Paschal was curious. "To fight for more than five million years and then just stop dead?"
"He asked Luga why, didn't get an answer. There was something she didn’t want to speak about and didn’t. But, Baylor says, she was frightened. Even talking about why scared her. Just the way daemons are scared of us."
"I think I can offer an opinion there." Hillary Clinton spoke up for the first time at one of those meetings. "I was speaking with President Sarkozy during the recent summit, when he wasn't preoccupied with checking out some Brazilian girl of course, and he told me something curious. Apparently some of the French and German troops in Hell, either referred to Satan as "the Devil" or called daemons, devils. The result was strange. The baldricks made themselves absent, very quickly. Strong negative reaction."
"Could it have been an abusive nickname, you know like Hun or Frog?"
"That would imply anger or offense and we know Baldricks react strongly to that. This was something else, it was fear, as if even mentioning the word could bring about a disaster." Clinton drew breath. "I don’t think daemons and devils are the same."
"All the books say they are."
"And all our books are wrong, we know that. How much mythology is standing up to the discoveries we're making every day? I think that Daemons and Devils are separate things and whatever the Devils are, the Daemons are afraid of them."
"A threat to us?"
General Schatten thought for a second. "I doubt it, if they were then they'd have taken down the Baldricks as quickly as we did."
"Can we rely on that?"
Schatten thought again. "No, but it’s the best way to bet given what we know. Look, in intelligence and knowledge terms, we're way out of our depth here. We're crossing a river blindfold, feeling a way with our feet and hoping we don’t step into a pothole or a nest of cottonmouths. All we can do is play the odds."
"So there might be a third force out there we'll have to deal with in due course?"
"Third? There may be dozens. The cosmology Doctor Kuroneko is developing suggests that there might be millions of bubble-worlds like Hell out there. All of different ages, just like the stars in our Universe are all of different ages. By the way, he's come up with a fascinating theory that might explain a lot. Our Universe is expanding, everybody knows that. But he thinks that the dimension, the next stage of existence, whatever we want to call it, that contains Heaven, Hell and all those bubble worlds is shrinking. He thinks that explains where the light in Hell and the energy that keeps the human souls alive there comes from. That's why they don’t have to eat."
"But Daemons eat." A slight shudder swept around the room at the thought of Luga's table manners. A few of the participants grinned sympathetically at Paschal. The Colonel thought about the rumors of Luga's combined eating and mating habits. The recollection made his testicles scream in terror and try to climb inside his body for protection.
"And that means that. . . . "
"Baldricks – and presumably Angels – aren’t native to the bubble-worlds either. They come from somewhere else as well."
"That might change a lot of things." Schatten thought carefully. "Could they come from other bubble worlds?"
"We can't tell." Surlethe thought carefully, the whole situation had aspects buried within aspects. "It may be that the no-eating rule only applies within their native bubble. Or it may be they come from outside the bubble-level completely. But all that's getting away from the point. We have some evidence that there's a third group of beings out there and we may run into them at any time."
"Third?" Hillary Clinton's voice was derisive. "There could be hundreds of them, thousands even. Have you any idea how many religions there have been? Or are now? Suppose they are all correct, suppose at one time or another, beings found their way here from other bubbleverses and got worshipped as Gods. And Yahweh and Satan were the two that eventually won out down here? They got the upper hand over the rest, perhaps by means of the portal warfare that Lugasharmanaska talked about, and drove them out. The 'devils' that we've been talking about may just have been one of those other groups, probably the one that was the most difficult to defeat. If we consider continuing to explore the bubbleverses, we're going to run into them."
"And that raises another question, an important one. When we do, how do we react?"
"That's for the council of 15 to say. They'll make up their mind."
"Not the United Nations?" The question came from a corner of the table, the speaker unidentified. The response was a contemptuous guffaw from the main participants.
"No, not the United Nations. They're irrelevant, been ever since Wong shot down the first Daemon Herald. They're still there but they're just the talking shop for people who can't contribute to the HEA. The real decisions are taken at Yamantau." Clinton thought carefully. "My guess will be, and this will be the position of the United States at Yamantau, we'll work on a do-as-they-do basis. If they approach us with friendship and respect, we'll do the same to them. If they make war on us, we'll do it to them. With every weapon we have."
"General Petraeus, do you have any comment on that?"
General Petraeus, present only on the view-screen at the end of the room looked up from the display he was consulting. It was showing the developing situation on the Thai-Myanmar border and he found it professionally fascinating. The Thai Army simply didn't fight the way the U.S. Army did. What they were doing was, to his eyes, downright weird. "We'd be advised to keep as many options open as possible but in essence, I agree with the Secretary of State. If we run into any such bubbleverse groups that are friendly, we get friendly. If not, then we defend ourselves. And that means eliminating our opponents."
"That's genocide." It was the same unidentified voice that had spoken about the United Nations.
Hillary Clinton looked back contemptuously. "No. That's pantheocide."
Last edited by Stuart on 2009-07-17 01:05pm, edited 1 time in total.
Nations do not survive by setting examples for others
Nations survive by making examples of others
Pure curiosity, who speaks in his own mind? I know I don't do it this detailed. Is Stuart simply embellishing Michaels internal commentary?
I agree with the idea of Jesus being the diplomat humans would be least likely to kill on the spot if they give him enough time to introduce himself. But Michael proposed to Yahweh Jesus would lead an army, so I think a ceasefire proposal by Heaven is at best ferociously unlikely.
bcoogler, I you just wanted to bring up the Mediterranean Sea, but missed it by a minute.
I'm still hard pressed to think of a reasonable way to pour fire from the sky without using volcanoes. If he could move one end of a portal I propose he could put a forest aflame and push the Heaven site of it through the burning trees. I'm clutching at straws, right?
Or acids... but its natural occurrence in Heaven is also unlikely though the firey feeling would at least be the same.
PS: READING
~Buritot
BRAN! The Morning Meal for Dyslexic Zombies!
Stuart wrote:"You are Almedha?" Lemuel read the name from his list. "Daughter of Brychan?"
Is that an indirect way to say reproduction of respawned humans is possible?
Stuart wrote:Lemuel caught a glimpse of their eyes. There was something there, something that reminded him of a sight long, long ago. It took him time to place it but when he did, the memory shook him. The look in the interrogators' eyes had been the same as that in the eyes of daemons taken prisoner in the war so many millennia before. That caused him to think a single, unmentionable question. Were there daemons in Hell, even though they looked like Angels?. And then that led to another question. And was he one of them?
Lemuel-Lan-Michael left the interrogation chamber and went off down the long corridor that would, eventually, take him back to the surface, his mind troubled by the questions inside it. Halfway towards the first junction he thought he heard a human woman screaming from the interrogation chamber he had just left but he dismissed it. Just the strange sounds that filled this place sometimes, a product of wind and tunnels through stone.
Huh. There was doubt in Lemuel but he quickly dismissed its audible reinforcement.
Hillary Clinton via Stuart wrote:That would imply anger or offense and we know Baldricks react strongly to that. This was something else, it was fear, as if even mentioning the word could bring about a disaster." Clinton drew breath. "I don’t think daemons and devils are the same.
My idea: The Others, for lack of a better term, intervened. They said something like 'stop fooling around or we hurt you' and they backed it up by acting on it.
Samuel wrote:As for other Gods... why would Earth get that crowded. Is there something special about the planet or are there that many groups out there?
Maybe it's really easy to hone in on us? After all it is easy to open a portal from their side (if most of them are on a higher level) to ours. Why they chose Earth in particular - who says they did? The Lovecraftian horrors were'n unique to earth either, but there were just that much of them you could hardly go a mile without waking one - so to speak.
Also, after this chapter we can assume the shrinking bubbles theory is canon. So... no sun neither for Heaven nor Hell.
~Buritot
BRAN! The Morning Meal for Dyslexic Zombies!
Stuart wrote:"You are Almedha?" Lemuel read the name from his list. "Daughter of Brychan?"
Is that an indirect way to say reproduction of respawned humans is possible?
If she had been born in heaven, I doubt her senses would be missing the taste of garlic as it were... From the narrative perspective it's probably to give trainspotters an idea of where and what period on earth she lived.
Revelations calls for Jesus to descend from Heaven with an army of angels and to smite all the kings of the world. So the prospect of putting him in charge of an army to go sweep down to Earth is simply a matter of following the script. And it doesn't happen for quite a while as the world is softened up by various plagues and miseries. Granted Revelations isn't being followed exactly so, but it is close enough and no doubt Yahweh really, really liked the idea of the hippie peacenik failure Jesus turning into some kind of badass righteous conqueror. The same motif recurs again in the Koran, which makes me wonder if Islam was just Yahweh's attempt to rectify the "mistakes" that Jesus made in his run on Earth.
Anyway, since sending down an army of angels to be slaughtered would probably involve too much portal activity to be a remotely good idea, and since their destruction would only reflect catastrophically bad on Michael, I imagine he has no intention of allowing things to go on long enough that it actually happens. Though of course staffing the army with everyone he doesn't like would probably also be a useful way to take advantage of Yahweh's insistence, so perhaps he would go that route if he has to.
There is the moral of all human tales;
Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption, — barbarism at last.
-Lord Byron, from 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'
Sure it sounds easy but bare in mind one thing we have seen consistantly through this story is that you have to generally be pretty close to somethign to open a portal next to it.
To pull this plan off you would need to be able to open a portal in outerspace that leads back into Heaven. Assuming this doesn't result in a massive depresurizeation of Heaven, you then have to make sure to capture whatever the sun portal spits out (it would take a smarter man than me to know exactly how the sun works, I mean does it shoot off balls of plasma?) and then make sure that they go through a second portal in heaven leading to aportal on earth.
Not to mention going with this strategy would require a relatively long lasting portal on in our universe, which means that if we could open our own portal in Hell close to the angel's portal close to the sun, we might be able to move forces through it, or at least launch some armed UAV into Heaven through it (even if we have to sling shot the suckers across because there's no air in the vacume of space for it to power its engines) which would let us do some damage, and some reconiscence of Heaven, possibly giving us enough information to let us open portals of our own from Earth to Heaven.
I think that given what resources he has aviable to him, Micheal's best move is to take advantage of the fact that a fair amount of the the lower class human dwellings in Heaven appear to made of tatch/straw and what not, get a big pile of the stuff together, rub some sticks up against each other (or use a match he picked up from Earth, after all he has to have some way of starting fires easily unless angels simply eat or inject all that weed he picked up from Earth) to light it on fire, open portal, and shovel it through said portal like there's no tommorow. Even if the stuff burns up before it hits the ground it still counts as fire from the sky and he can probably get away with BSing Yah-Yah about how well the whole thing went before moving onto the next bowl of wrath which will hopefully (for him at least) be easier to create and do more damage.
Oh and one other thing, the reason God and Satan just stopped fighting, I get the feeling that it's around this point in history when the "other" gods (the ones who protected Cesar) dropped out of the fight...
Last edited by Jamesfirecat on 2009-07-17 02:26pm, edited 1 time in total.
"We'd be advised to keep as many options open as possible but in essence, I agree with the Secretary of State. If we run into any such bubbleverse groups that are friendly, we get friendly. If not, then we defend ourselves. And that means eliminating our opponents."
"That's genocide." It was the same unidentified voice that had spoken about the United Nations.
Hillary Clinton looked back contemptuously. "No. That's pantheocide."
It strikes me as something of a leap in logic that defending oneself against an enemy must automatically require their total extermination. We didn't do that to the Baldricks, even after they lava-bombed two of our cities. Their leaders were hostile, yes, and a great many of them participated in acts of cruelty to deceased humans over the eons... but we didn't go around rendering them extinct.
I have a hard time seeing us do so to the Angels, either. Sure, we'll probably knock off Yahweh, Michael and any Angel who is part of their military or government, but that will only constitute a fraction of the population. The rest are essentially civilians, and will probably wind up similar to the Baldricks afterwards.
And then what? We go exploring out into the bubble-worlds, conquering anything that looks at us funny? Where do we draw the line?
If at first you don't succeed, get a bigger starship and try again.
Jim Starluck wrote: It strikes me as something of a leap in logic that defending oneself against an enemy must automatically require their total extermination. We didn't do that to the Baldricks, even after they lava-bombed two of our cities. Their leaders were hostile, yes, and a great many of them participated in acts of cruelty to deceased humans over the eons... but we didn't go around rendering them extinct.
In militarese, eliminating an opponent means eliminating their ability to resist or endanger; ie render them incapable of fighting. The full sense of the phrase is "eliminate them from the game" rather than "eliminate them from existance".
And then what? We go exploring out into the bubble-worlds, conquering anything that looks at us funny? Where do we draw the line?
Wait and see.
Nations do not survive by setting examples for others
Nations survive by making examples of others
And then what? We go exploring out into the bubble-worlds, conquering anything that looks at us funny? Where do we draw the line?
While I'm sure that Stuart will be putting plenty of thought into this issue comes Lords of War, basically once we've finally managed to sort out all of the issue that have arrizon because of conquering Heaven and Hell, assuming that humanity doesn't start picking fights with each other all over again (granted I'd like to think that without religion as a reason for killing people we'd be less likely to do it, but on the other hand there's a whole lot of new "land" to claim and I'm sure at some point in some way people will fight over it) we'll either just more or less sit pretty as things stand or else yeah start expanding into other Bubble Worlds.
If we do I'd like to think that humanity would take an approach similar (but obviously much more genial and nicer) to that of the Tau Empire in Warhammer 40K.
When you come across a new species you ask them to join us and if they do then all is well and good. If they refuse then we'll show them all the domestic and what not comforts that come from being a member of our civilization. If still they refuse then we calmly point a whole mess of guns (and missles and planes and whatever else we have on hand) at them and ask if they're sure, possibly with some demonstrations of just what our firepower is capable of. If they still our biting after that then I'd suggest we ignore that particular bubble reality until they attack us, at which point we should conquer them and go about making them memembers of our civilzation as second class citizens at first like we have with the Baldricks and hopefully a few generations down the line they won't be discriminated against anymore.
It's not exactly the most detailed plan for what comes next, but that's my blueprint of what might possibly be in humanity's future...
Stuart wrote:
In militarese, eliminating an opponent means eliminating their ability to resist or endanger; ie render them incapable of fighting. The full sense of the phrase is "eliminate them from the game" rather than "eliminate them from existance".
Jamesfirecat wrote:When you come across a new species you ask them to join us and if they do then all is well and good. If they refuse then we'll show them all the domestic and what not comforts that come from being a member of our civilization. If still they refuse then we calmly point a whole mess of guns (and missles and planes and whatever else we have on hand) at them and ask if they're sure, possibly with some demonstrations of just what our firepower is capable of. If they still our biting after that then I'd suggest we ignore that particular bubble reality until they attack us, at which point we should conquer them and go about making them memembers of our civilzation as second class citizens at first like we have with the Baldricks and hopefully a few generations down the line they won't be discriminated against anymore.
So, we act like the Mafia and make them an offer they can't refuse? Not very nice of us.
I would hope we would be better than that, but history supports you in terms of what we actually wind up doing.
Let's hope we don't run into a more technologically advanced civilization with a similar viewpoint.
Edit: Oops, misread the part about ignoring them unless they attack. I tend to be a bit cynical. I suspect we would never quite leave them alone. Some one might even try to provoke an attack to generate an excuse to move in.
Last edited by bcoogler on 2009-07-17 03:11pm, edited 1 time in total.
And then what? We go exploring out into the bubble-worlds, conquering anything that looks at us funny? Where do we draw the line?
Wait and see.
Humanity - the scousers of the multiverse. "Are you startin' something? Eh? Eh?"
So I stare wistfully at the Lightning for a couple of minutes. Two missiles, sharply raked razor-thin wings, a huge, pregnant belly full of fuel, and the two screamingly powerful engines that once rammed it from a cold start to a thousand miles per hour in under a minute. Life would be so much easier if our adverseries could be dealt with by supersonic death on wings - but alas, Human resources aren't so easily defeated.
DEATH wrote:Any chance of my name being used for someone/something?
You already have a major angel that shares your title- what more could you need?
a. My real name ye twat .
b. I've changed my username name anyway .
Photography Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Attacking/crippling new races and worlds we meet is sensible. If we find another portal-capable power which can field an army equivalent to ours that WON'T agree to peace, they pose a threat to us greater than Heaven does.
As such, we can't allow them to run around freely and threaten us.
Stuart: The only problem is, I'm losing track of which universe I'm in.
You kinda look like Jesus. With a lightsaber.- Peregrin Toker
Being fundamentally electromagnetic in nature, it will probably not be far in the future before portal generation can be jammed at will. Nonfriendly (note: not hostile) bubble-worlds may pose zero threat to us. We might even be clever enough to allow Fedex portals to and from hell to generate as they choose but block any incoming portals that don't have knowledge of the operation of the jamming.
bcoogler wrote:You could still have an "ocean dump" from Heaven occur in some area that lead to the flood story, and still not show up in the geological record.
Edit. A further thought is, if the Mediterranean was once dry land, Heaven could have flooded it by "dynamiting" the Straits of Gibraltar open, allowing the Atlantic to flood the entire area. That would certainly have seemed like the end of the world.
That would require nuclear-equivalent capability, or really good geology; Stuart implies that Heaven and Hell are less capable than that. Good idea, though.
tim31 wrote:The first line, no, it's not just you. But they SD/NKVD whatever are only slightly more sympathetic.
The second? There's a trope for that, I'm pretty sure. But it fits so nicely that a story that deconstructs religion features a geocentric multiverse
Who says it's geocentric? Maybe there are hundreds of bubble universes with intelligent life per planet in the "real" universe with intelligent life. It's not that we have an unusual number of them, it's just that the usual number is quite large.
Buritot wrote:Huh. There was doubt in Lemuel but he quickly dismissed its audible reinforcement.
Given the mental climate in Stuart's idea of Heaven, anyone who isn't good at doublethink isn't going to stay in a position of power or responsibility for long.
Samuel wrote:Put a portal in the sun
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just open the portal on Earth and start tossing nuclear-tipped Tomahawks through? Besides, Heaven is nice real estate, and it's a shame to damage nice real estate more than you have to to win the war.
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