Armageddon???? - Part Eighty One Up

Guardsman Bass · Post by **Guardsman Bass** » 2008-05-30 06:31pm

Could you stick a nuke on the end of a missile and fire it through the portal into Heaven, just to see who it hits? I imagine the reaction among the angels to it would be less than amused.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2008-05-30 07:05pm

Guardsman Bass wrote:Could you stick a nuke on the end of a missile and fire it through the portal into Heaven, just to see who it hits? I imagine the reaction among the angels to it would be less than amused.

I believe you've forgotten to consider the phrase collateral damage. Yahweh has his own legions of the undead, made to give up their "life energy" by endlessly worshiping him. Randomly lobbing nukes into Heaven would be an excellent way of killing the people we'd like to save.

rhoenix · Post by **rhoenix** » 2008-05-30 07:07pm

GrandMasterTerwynn wrote:I believe you've forgotten to consider the phrase collateral damage. Yahweh has his own legions of the undead, made to give up their "life energy" by endlessly worshiping him. Randomly lobbing nukes into Heaven would be an excellent way of killing the people we'd like to save.

The irony, however, would be delicious.

This story is developing wonderfully so far, and I look forward to continued developments, Stuart.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2008-05-30 07:15pm

rhoenix wrote:
GrandMasterTerwynn wrote:I believe you've forgotten to consider the phrase collateral damage. Yahweh has his own legions of the undead, made to give up their "life energy" by endlessly worshiping him. Randomly lobbing nukes into Heaven would be an excellent way of killing the people we'd like to save.
The irony, however, would be delicious.

I'm sorry, how would the ironic ultimate destruction of people duped into worshipping a malevolent diety for all eternity be a good thing?

rhoenix · Post by **rhoenix** » 2008-05-30 07:20pm

CaptainChewbacca wrote:I'm sorry, how would the ironic ultimate destruction of people duped into worshipping a malevolent diety for all eternity be a good thing?

At no point did I say the above would be a "good thing."

I simply stated that the irony of it would be "delicious," which would likely be better put as "viciously funny" - perhaps it's simply the thought of Heaven (as a place) being made uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years because it got carpet-nuked.

However, I do certainly grant that Hell getting carpet-nuked would be far more ironic, as well as much funnier.

EDIT: I somehow managed to mis-spell "it's."

Way too long overdue EDIT: Added the part about Hell. Since it's true.

The Duchess of Zeon · Post by **The Duchess of Zeon** » 2008-05-30 08:17pm

GrandMasterTerwynn wrote:
Guardsman Bass wrote:Could you stick a nuke on the end of a missile and fire it through the portal into Heaven, just to see who it hits? I imagine the reaction among the angels to it would be less than amused.
I believe you've forgotten to consider the phrase collateral damage. Yahweh has his own legions of the undead, made to give up their "life energy" by endlessly worshiping him. Randomly lobbing nukes into Heaven would be an excellent way of killing the people we'd like to save.

Why would we want to save them? The denizens of heaven are collaborationists.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2008-05-30 08:20pm

I imagine the first thing they'd do is train a whole lot of guns on the portal, after blowing away all of the rock and other fortifications around it. Then they'd want to find out what's on the other side, which you can do with a remote-controlled robot if the portal is too small to fly a UAV through. The kind of robot they typically use for bomb disposal is pretty much off-the-shelf.

PS. Then again, they could probably get plenty of intel information from baldricks, which would make this step unnecessary.

Adrian Laguna · Post by **Adrian Laguna** » 2008-05-30 08:24pm

The Duchess of Zeon wrote:Why would we want to save them? The denizens of heaven are collaborationists.

Are they? From the looks of things they would switch sides given half a chance. It's not the same league as Hell, but being forced to chant the same thing for thousands of years is its own form of torture.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2008-05-30 08:41pm

You know, I just had an absolutely sadistic thought (then again, nothing in Armageddon probably could be called sadistic next to the horrors Yahweh and Satan have inflicted...)

When we finally figure out how to target both ends of a portal remotely, either very far away from the person being used or removing the person from the equation entirely, it occurred to me that it should theoretically be possible to, for example, open a portal from Heaven to deep space. Seems to me that Yahweh and the others probably aren't capable of surviving in vacuum...

Other nasty possibilities (limited, of course, to the penetration abilities of microwave-band radiation and the speed of light):

- In the solar corona
- Under the ocean, as others have noted previously. We could probably substitute Titan for our own ocean, depending on how far the portals could be targeted, since draining our own ocean probably wouldn't be such a good idea.

Depending on how big Heaven is, we could also build a nuclear-powered ramjet or, hell, a Project Pluto-type drone and send it through, irradiating everything as it spins around. It could even drop bombs as it went.

bilateralrope · Post by **bilateralrope** » 2008-05-30 09:42pm

Crayz9000 wrote:You know, I just had an absolutely sadistic thought (then again, nothing in Armageddon probably could be called sadistic next to the horrors Yahweh and Satan have inflicted...)

When we finally figure out how to target both ends of a portal remotely, either very far away from the person being used or removing the person from the equation entirely, it occurred to me that it should theoretically be possible to, for example, open a portal from Heaven to deep space. Seems to me that Yahweh and the others probably aren't capable of surviving in vacuum...

Problem is that Heaven has a portal to Hell, and Hell has a portal to Earth, so air will be sucked all the way through.

Adrian Laguna · Post by **Adrian Laguna** » 2008-05-30 09:44pm

“People call us many things. Targeteers, Contractors, The Business, The Wizards of Armageddon. The last was intended as an insult but we rather like it. And, of course, it has turned out to be a much more accurate description than its author realized.”

I love that subtle flirting with the fourth wall.

Junghalli · Post by **Junghalli** » 2008-05-30 10:07pm

Adrian Laguna wrote:Are they? From the looks of things they would switch sides given half a chance. It's not the same league as Hell, but being forced to chant the same thing for thousands of years is its own form of torture.

Not to mention they've been lied to by malevolent cosmic hucksters, and most of them have probably undergone a lifetime of indoctrination before death. Besides, what are they supposed to do, tell the Angels to piss off and get tortured in Hell for millenia? Given that choice I suspect most of us would probably start kowtowing furiously, even if we know what the Angels really are, which they don't.

Post by **Surlethe** » 2008-05-30 11:49pm

Darth Wong wrote:I imagine the first thing they'd do is train a whole lot of guns on the portal, after blowing away all of the rock and other fortifications around it. Then they'd want to find out what's on the other side, which you can do with a remote-controlled robot if the portal is too small to fly a UAV through. The kind of robot they typically use for bomb disposal is pretty much off-the-shelf.

It may not be necessary to go through to get an idea of what's on the other side (and BTW, this is the reason why a robot would be preferable to a UAV if/when the humans get to the point of seizing Heavengate and using it for an assault on Heaven). The Heavengate is analogous to the Korean DMZ: it's where two brutal antagonists rub shoulders and stare at each other menacingly across vaguely neutral territory. The problem that the builders of the Heavengate in Hell faced was this: how to forestall a sudden, massive attack by Heaven, short of permanently camping a large army around the portal? Solution: throw a building over it (a massive pyramid, in fact) and enclose the portal in a small room with a smaller passage, creating an artificial bottleneck. Yahweh can still send soldiers through, but instead of being able to send two dozen flying angels and two dozen infantry through at once, the flying angels are useless and the infantry come out one at a time, at a crawl. The humongous wall is actually a backup in case the angels actually manage to establish a beachhead outside of the building; it'll be difficult enough to reinforce through the beachhead at a rate capable of countering attrition once the demons there launch a counterattack, and to get anywhere in Hell, they'll need to contend with the sizeable harpy garrison as well as seize the wall.

It is not inconceivable that the denizens of Heaven followed a similar train of thought. We can expect that the Heavenly portal is enclosed in a building, surrounded by defensive fortifications. Flying a UAV through the portal is therefore probably a bad idea, but a robot is still a good idea.

Darth Raptor · Post by **Darth Raptor** » 2008-05-31 12:13am

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Abrigor-kun is AWESOME! If not just for the fact that he DOES take the time to smell the roses!

Am I the only one who gets Satan from South Park every time I try to visualize Abigor?

KlavoHunter · Post by **KlavoHunter** » 2008-05-31 12:44am

Satan doesn't quite seem to be in the business of making sure certain people got special treatment - this seems to be the niche area of the old Greek/Roman gods, since it was hinted here that "people were given special freedoms in Hell" by the "old gods that we usurped". Presumably they mean Caesar.

So, no, I don't think Saddam is Satan's gay lover.

Eulogy · Post by **Eulogy** » 2008-05-31 12:49am

SO when do we parade a drugged Uriel in a cage in front of angelic civilains?

Gerald Tarrant · Post by **Gerald Tarrant** » 2008-05-31 01:41am

Adrian Laguna wrote:
The Duchess of Zeon wrote:Why would we want to save them? The denizens of heaven are collaborationists.
Are they? From the looks of things they would switch sides given half a chance. It's not the same league as Hell, but being forced to chant the same thing for thousands of years is its own form of torture.

Further, the human residents of heaven seem to be the victims of the world's oldest pyramid scheme.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2008-05-31 03:41am

I don't think opening a portal to deep space would do anything. We aren't getting any sort of air/weather transferrence through the earth/hell gate, so it may be that portals do prevent SOME things from passing through.

Edward Yee · Post by **Edward Yee** » 2008-05-31 03:47am

Eulogy wrote:SO when do we parade a drugged Uriel in a cage in front of angelic civilains?

*groan* Admittedly this is the sort of thing that gets me to feel the way Stas Bush did a while back.

I do feel that if the human administrations got a look at what goes on in Heaven, the versions of them that Stuart has shown would probably be loath to simply abandon them to die (again) or write them off.

P.S. To those who question Stuart's portrayals of certain real-life figures -- I distinctly remember him having high opinions of both Gen. Petraeus and Secretary of State Rice, at least, in real life and having worked with them both?

bilateralrope · Post by **bilateralrope** » 2008-05-31 04:09am

CaptainChewbacca wrote:I don't think opening a portal to deep space would do anything. We aren't getting any sort of air/weather transferrence through the earth/hell gate, so it may be that portals do prevent SOME things from passing through.

What kind if transference should we of seen if the portals did let everything through both ways ?

Assuming that the air pressure has already equalised from portals in the past.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2008-05-31 04:29am

bilateralrope wrote:
CaptainChewbacca wrote:I don't think opening a portal to deep space would do anything. We aren't getting any sort of air/weather transferrence through the earth/hell gate, so it may be that portals do prevent SOME things from passing through.
What kind if transference should we of seen if the portals did let everything through both ways ?

Assuming that the air pressure has already equalised from portals in the past.

Wind, dust, and just the odor of hell for one. The fact that the choking clouds of hell aren't seeping through into Iraq makes me think there's some mechanism to prevent just that thing. It could be as simple as air molecules don't have enough mass for all I know.

Post by **NecronLord** » 2008-05-31 06:30am

CaptainChewbacca wrote:Wind, dust, and just the odor of hell for one. The fact that the choking clouds of hell aren't seeping through into Iraq makes me think there's some mechanism to prevent just that thing. It could be as simple as air molecules don't have enough mass for all I know.

It could be that air pressure here is fractionally higher, and we'll get their air circulating through when the pressure equalises.

KlavoHunter · Post by **KlavoHunter** » 2008-05-31 09:48am

Perhaps the weight of the air molecules, and the fairly negligible force behind their typical movement, renders them unable to 'penetrate' the Hellmouth?

PainRack · Post by **PainRack** » 2008-05-31 10:57am

Is Belial scarificing his harpies in an attempt to get his army to close quarters?

It seems as if he's using the harpies as skirmishers, locating and pinning down enemy troops until his main line can crush them.

Stuart · Post by **Stuart** » 2008-05-31 12:26pm

CaptainChewbacca wrote:Wind, dust, and just the odor of hell for one. The fact that the choking clouds of hell aren't seeping through into Iraq makes me think there's some mechanism to prevent just that thing. It could be as simple as air molecules don't have enough mass for all I know.

There is actually some level of tranferrance going on but its limited (the portal doesn't have any physical effect like suction, its simple a hole that separates two spaces. So small amounts of hell-atmosphere are seeping into human space and vice versa but the amounts are so small they're stratistically inconsequential.

And I have no intention of parading Uriel in a cage.