The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Junghalli]

For a wing to be badly broken suggests a hard physical edge, at least for him, to the portal that he created.

I interpreted it as him being unable to fit the wing into the portal in his haste, with the result that its tip didn't enter the portal and stayed behind on Earth while the rest of him transited to Heaven.

[Singular Quartet]

His injuries are quite interesting and knowing Stuart they are noted for a reason. For a wing to be badly broken suggests a hard physical edge, at least for him, to the portal that he created. Here it is also noted that the wound is taking sufficiently long to heal that he speaks out about it. But of more interest are the effects of fragments of the missile and missile warhead when they detonated. There may be some steel but there's also a lot of aluminium and titanium I would suspect. And to shield/isolate Belial Michael uses bronze rather than the aluminium etc used by humans...

So, do Angels have some issues with a certain metal or metals?

Aluminum was only discovered in the last 150 years or so, and given the way nobody likes Iron, that means either Bronze, Gold, or Silver, I think. Maybe a few others (zinc? tin?). Bronze makes the better shielding material, as I recall, so bronze roof it is.

[Darth Wong]

Can’t wait to see what happens when the Angel of Death heads to California, though of course wouldn’t it be more dramatically appropriate if Michael had sicked him on… crap my knowledge of homosexual culture is really bad, but isn’t it Los Anglos that has like the huge gay community? You know putting the “sodomy” back in “Sodom and Gomorrah” not to mention “city of angels” so that makes it a doubly ironic place for him to get blown to pieces? But I suppose Michael chose his “friends” destination for how likely it was to get him killed, not for how hard the place it happened would cause him to laugh afterwards…

That would be San Fransisco.

I thought the social conservative wing of the GOP was the biggest gay community in the country

[GrayAnderson]

Can’t wait to see what happens when the Angel of Death heads to California, though of course wouldn’t it be more dramatically appropriate if Michael had sicked him on… crap my knowledge of homosexual culture is really bad, but isn’t it Los Anglos that has like the huge gay community? You know putting the “sodomy” back in “Sodom and Gomorrah” not to mention “city of angels” so that makes it a doubly ironic place for him to get blown to pieces? But I suppose Michael chose his “friends” destination for how likely it was to get him killed, not for how hard the place it happened would cause him to laugh afterwards…

That would be San Fransisco.

I thought the social conservative wing of the GOP was the biggest gay community in the country

Nah...there's just a big closet in there, with plenty of skeletons.

[RecklessPrudence]

Oh, man - Stuart, I didn't think it was possible, after the way he was introduced, but you've got me feeling sorry for Uriel! I mean, he has no idea that Michael is setting him up in choice of targets, he thinks that Michael is going to plead his case to Yah-Yah, hell, he probably fought alongside Michael in the Civil War and still thinks of him as an old war buddy!

And Michael, well, like some others, I don't think he's quite as smart or on top of things as he thinks he is, but that's not to say he isn't more dangerous than Yah-Yah, even with how likeable he seems. He seems more dangerous than Yahweh and Satan combined, if only because he's open to new ideas and aware of what's going on around him.

The fact that Uriel's wing is damaged may force him to start considering hills as an option, making him that much more dangerous. When he opens a portal, it'll probably still be detectable, but without radar showing an anomalous blip, the humans may not be able to find him fast enough to stop him from doing a more complete job.

Keep 'em coming!

[Darth Yan]

This prediction could be completely wrong, but me thinks that Uriel will get captured when he tries to take San Diego, and as he learns about human culture he starts to doubt Yahweh's perfection. He also discover's the full extent of what Michael's doing, but when he tries to tell Yahweh Yahweh refuses to believe him and instead tries to execute him. for some reason or another human's rescue him, and uriel fully switches sides. Again, this is just a guess.

[Jamesfirecat]

This prediction could be completely wrong, but me thinks that Uriel will get captured when he tries to take San Diego, and as he learns about human culture he starts to doubt Yahweh's perfection. He also discover's the full extent of what Michael's doing, but when he tries to tell Yahweh Yahweh refuses to believe him and instead tries to execute him. for some reason or another human's rescue him, and uriel fully switches sides. Again, this is just a guess.

Given how much fun/ how interesting it was to see how Abigor dealt with being a human captive it would be again quite interesting to see how an angel, deals with getting an up close and personal look at human society from our side of the window.

That said it might also make it seem like Stuart was just repeating the same themes all over again so it might not happen.

Either way, one thing that I should have touched on early but forgot about is as follows, Micheal has heard about how his "friend" just barely escaped from his last brush with humanity, the question is now, how can he make sure that Uriel gets killed when it seems like he can always open portals on a dime?

[Edward Yee]

To get that detailed might be getting a bit too "tactical" for Michael's own good, since it's not as if Uriel's so "on to something" that he has to die in the next sortie. Then again, this is the guy who for whatever reason was his own drug mule...

EDIT: I should clarify re: "tactical," that it might be micromanaging to try to ensure Uriel's death by the next mission beyond simply sending him to a hard (USMC/USN)/plausible (San Diego)/acceptable (not Vegas) target, and things wouldn't actually get risky for Michael unless Uriel ends up having enough such close scrapes.

[Stuart]

3) Text interpretation assistance request:
"Yah-yah never grew tired of people worshiping him. Still, he'd found a whole new planet full of primitive sentients he could convert into a new cult. Had things gone the way they had, the discarded humans would have been condemned to Hell, there to disappear slowly, just as they themselves had replaced the ones who had gone before them."

The word 'before' got missed out. It should read "had things gone the way they had before, the discarded......"

-First, I interpret this to mean that there were other races in Heaven earlier, and that Yahweh cleared them out as he brought the humans in. One suspects he did so in stages (simply phasing the prior guys out to avoid irritating labor shortages and whatnot).

That's right, there have been races taken into Heavenly service (and/or sent to Hell) before and they have been discarded and replaced.

Third, on the disappearance front, I'd presume that either the demons ate their way through their stockpiles of the older races while humans were coming "up to par" in quantity, but the line does raise the issue of them just fading away (as in literal Jedi-like fading or some other effect; the "incorruptible" bodies might actually have a cap on their shelf life at a half a million years or something like that).

That's right, the older races just got expended and were replaced when their numbers ran out or Satan and Yahweh got bored with them.

And of course, I'm also led to wonder, on the Caesarian section of this chapter, whether there might just be a third race running around bubble universe land. After all, Stuart did make an explicit distinction between "demons" and "devils" at one point.

More than a third and on more than two levels of existance.

Michael is becoming a quite filled out character. He appears to have some endearing features. But I have this nagging feeling that he is being dissected by Stuart somewhat as he dissected Goering. ie, appears to have a lot of endearing qualities - can be avuncular, friendly, gregarious, witty, generous etc but at base he's a cold calculating utterly evil bastard who'd sell his mother down the river if it suited.

Michael is a 'magnificent bastard' (see TVtropes.org for the definition). While he would sell his mother down the river without a second thought, he would make sure she had a nice packed lunch for the trip. I had Goering in mind when I sketched out his character, the two share a lot in common. Both are dangerous precisely because, on casual contact, the extent of their evil isn't apparent until its too late. Rather like handling a Kingsnake and then finding out it was a coral snake.

By the way, after learning about how the prophecies came to exist, why does Yahweh feel the need to act upon visions that he was not personally responsible for giving? I mean I figure that it would in fact even rub up the wrong way against his ENORMOUS ego to think that he, GOD, would have to have his actions dictated by human preconceived notions about how he’s going to go about killing us all off.

Not Yahweh, Michael. As Yahweh's general, Michael is running the war against humans. He's trying to follow the prophecies in an effort to confuse and misdirect humans.

By the way just on something that would make it funny while “angel pole dancers” is good, in my opinion “angelic pole dancers” is funnier just because it drives home the oxymoronic nature of what’s going on better if you care to take my advice.

Not a good idea, its fundamentally changing the meaning of the phrase. By saying "angelic" the phrase means the pole-dancers simply look like angels - a description that could be applied to a lot of human showgirls. By using "angel pole dancers" its reinforcing the point that these are the real thing, they don't look like angels, they are angels.

[Darth Wong]

It seems like following the prophecies is a psychological warfare tactic, playing into a lot of culturally ingrained fears.

[Surlethe]

Possible continuity error: at the time of the writing of Revelation, wasn't Michael still entirely loyal to Yahweh? And therefore, he ought not be running around with drugs, right?

[Darth Wong]

I thought Michael was loyal to Yahweh during the Great Celestial War, which happened long before the Roman imperial period.

[Surlethe]

See chapter five: Michael has only started questioning Yahweh's authority since he began investigating the Enlightenment "a few centuries ago".

[Stuart]

Possible continuity error: at the time of the writing of Revelation, wasn't Michael still entirely loyal to Yahweh? And therefore, he ought not be running around with drugs, right?

Not really; Michael was keeping in contact with humans and exploiting their reserves of street-corner pharmaecuticals for centuries. However, during most of this period he held humans in utter contempt because of their blind obedience and unquestioning acceptance of divine word. So, as shown in this section he simply exploited them and experimented on them. However, with the Renaissance and its associated enlightenment, he saw humans breaking out of that restricted mold and start to think for themselves. In watching them do that, he grrew sympathy for them - and started to think for himself as well. And that's when he also started to think about getting rid of Yahweh and establishing a more equitable rule in Heaven.

[Baughn]

This chapter has one very interesting detail of portal physics hidden in it. Namely, you can break a wing on them.

What does this mean?
Well, solidity is a near-field effect of the electromagnetic properties of atoms. Specifically, while they are electrically neutral at range, once you get inside the (vague) outer limit of their electron orbitals, you see a net positive charge on them; since you're made of atoms as well, what you get is two positive charges repelling each other.

This does not necessarily mean that the same effect is in evidence here; it could be something as simple as an immense (negative) gravitational potential well, which is about what you'd expect from a wormhole. But it is a near-field effect; it goes to zero in a (small) finite distance.

So, we've got two options here. Either the portals are electromagnetically active, in very weird and unlikely ways that really imply they're made of ordinary atoms, or it's possible to create a near-field gravitational effect in an open system - no need for a reflecting box to keep it cooped up, even.

The former possibility would strike any physicist as bizarre. The latter is more than what is technically required for wormholes to exist, and opens up for all sorts of interesting possibilities - artificial gravity, tractor beams, all the usual features of gravitic engineering. Not, of course, reactionless drives; those are just silly. But while it might seem a bit odd, there's nothing theoretically stopping you from tractoring a planet, never mind the range.

Further, since this is in the context of wormholes, what we're talking about as a possibility is full-blown space-time engineering. It wouldn't take very long before someone would figure out how to make basement universes and intra-universe wormholes, leading to.. well, so many revolutions it'd take me days to write them all out.

Nothing's saying any of this is easy, of course, and there could be (probably are) limitations in the actual physics that prevent some of them from actually being possible, but.. yeah, the portal not just slicing off his wing really says quite a lot. Now they just need to figure out how to do it by pure machinery, and they'll have a second industrial revolution on their hands. (Or a third, depending on whether it happens before or after they figure out nanofactories. )

[Jamesfirecat]

Oh and one more idea just occured to me with all this talk about how Uriel sliced his wing off on the portal. Is it possible for us to weaponize portals? Not just use them as a form of transportation or to a method of delivering ordience against our enemies, but to actually slice and dice them apart with portals? I think in one of the Wheel of Time books the heroes use magical portals in such away by opening them up and lcosing them rappidly causing half of a person's body to get stuck on either side of the portal.

Of course our control over opening and closign them clearly ins't that fine tunned at the moment, but it's something to think about for the future isn't it?

[Baughn]

But that's the thing; he didn't slice his wing, it was explicitly broken instead.

That's fine, though. This way has a lot more potential.

[Darth Yan]

A part of me thinks that Uriel and Michael are going to face off at some point in the story, especially if Uriel discovers Michael's duplicity.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I thought it was just the force of the explosion that hit him that broke the wing. He DID take shrapnel.

[Baughn]

It'd be nice to have word from Stuart on that. Realistically, the people in the story must know how this portal thing acts.

I thought it was pretty obviously a result of crashing into the edge of the portal, though.

[Stuart]

I thought it was pretty obviously a result of crashing into the edge of the portal, though.

That's correct, the wing broke when he went through a portal that was too small for him.

[bcoogler]

Hi! New guy here....

One thought about an attack against San Diego. I assume an attack by Uriel might very well succeed in decimating the well-regarded San Diego Zoo, including a few giant pandas on loan from China. If nothing else, that would make for an interesting public relations (propaganda) opportunity to further stir up the public at large against Heaven.

Yahweh hates cute, fluffy*, endangered species! He kills baby pandas!

---
*Never mine reality; I'm talking the popular image of pandas.

[Darth Wong]

San Diego is a mid-sized city (population > 1 million), so it begs the question of Uriel's maximum area of effect. It's also worth noting that in order to get to the zoo, assuming he approaches from the south, he has to get past a lot of military areas.

[bcoogler]

[...]assuming he approaches from the south, he has to get past a lot of military areas.

LOL! That certainly makes sense, since Uriel feels safer in Mexico. And if he gets shot down, the headlines can read, "Pandas Saved!"

Sadly, many people will react more strongly if cute, fluffy animals are killed -- or saved from certain doom -- then their fellow man. This tendency is probably even stronger now if people can be expected to just reappear in a now reformed Hell, and beloved pets cannot.

Just thinking this behavior can be exploited for further turning hearts and minds against Heaven, especially if some people might still balk against the very idea of a direct attack against Heaven. One needs public opinion on one's side, after all.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I thought it was pretty obviously a result of crashing into the edge of the portal, though.

That's correct, the wing broke when he went through a portal that was too small for him.

Fascinating. Portals have fixed, solid edges that can exert force on objects.