The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[DataPacRat]

If Yahweh becomes more of an actual character than a lightning-flinging temper tantrum... I can imagine something along these lines being said: "The prophecies of the Christian religion are not being fulfilled! I declare that Christianity is a /false/ religion! Michael, what other faiths revere Me but declare Christianity to be false?" "Uh, well, sir, <thinking fast> there's Islam, but-" "Very well! I now declare Islam to be the One True Faith. Do not bother pouring the final Bowls; we will switch to the Islamic version of the End of the World. The humans will not be expecting /that/." "Uh... yessir, you are great, oh Lord. I'll have someone go tell Jesus that he's not your son, just a prophet... <thinks to self: "And look up what the Islamic version of Armageddon /is/.">"

Remember Yahweh has wrapped up on humanity, he's done with us and consigned us all to Hell. he's got a new race to play with,

I guess I forgot that detail... possibly because I simply don't recall even a hint of what that other race might /be/. Maybe a foreshadowy hint or two about 'fur and prehensile tails' or 'tentacles and color-shifting skin' could be inserted during the editing stage?

[Simon_Jester]

Re: DataPacRat
Do the Muslims even have a version of Armageddon? I mean, they really have only one prophet, and as prophets go Muhammed was a pretty stable, balanced guy. Not the sort to go off ranting and raving about how the universe was coming to an end.

In terms of hard science, there actually exist compounds that absorb though all pathways like this and have powerful physiological effects in trace amounts. Thinks like nerve gas, for example, have really really low LD50s. Given that similar air scrubbing schemes for combatting chemical warfare agents have to be deployed against succubi to prevent their miasma from functioning on people, they have the psychotropic happy drug equivalent of VX vaporizing off their skin. That's pretty ridiculously powerful an ability. Frankly, Stu has hot-rodded the powers of alot of daemons and angels beyond what is actually feasible, to make them more potent, not less.

The succubi's psychotropic effect isn't that potent, I think; or at least it's a lot less persistent than nerve agents.

Frankly, Stu has hot-rodded the powers of alot of daemons and angels beyond what is actually feasible, to make them more potent, not less. The snag is that Stuart also doesn't treat superpowers as an automatic win button, the way alot of fiction does.

I think this is a lot of the problem. People generally have been schooled to believe that having a superpower is automatically a devastating advantage. Rather like a lot of people actually believe the "German uberweapons win WW2" nonsense. Running into a situation where having superpowers simply doesn't do enough good to matter is a heck of a wrench.

To be fair to people who think that way, a superpower really is automatically a devastating advantage, almost by definition, all else being equal. That underlined bit being the catch that tends to get overlooked.

If daemons had broadly equivalent technical capability, and equivalent ability to understand and analyze technology to the human ability to understand and analyze their special powers, Armageddon would have been a Curbstomp War... the other way. To beat a major advantage you need another major advantage, even if it's only a mundane one like "We outnumber the enemy five to one."

In reality, all else is only occasionally equal, so granting one side a superpower the other doesn't have won't make a difference very often... but when it does, it's likely to be a huge, immediately apparent difference. The sort of thing that causes people to falsely generalize from the special case to the general, simply because the special case is so damn impressive.

[DataPacRat]

Re: DataPacRat
Do the Muslims even have a version of Armageddon? I mean, they really have only one prophet, and as prophets go Muhammed was a pretty stable, balanced guy. Not the sort to go off ranting and raving about how the universe was coming to an end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdi and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiyamah should get you started on the Muslim version of the End Times.

Signs of the Mahdi


According to Moojan Momen, among the most commonly reported signs that presage the advent of the Mahdi in Shia hadith are the following:

1. Before his coming will come the red death and the white death. The red death is the sword and the white death is plague. (See also Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)
2. Several figures will appear: the one-eyed Dajjal, the Sufyani and the Yamani.
3. The Arabs will throw off the reins and take possession of their land, throwing out the authority of the foreigners.
4. There will be a great conflict in the land of Syria until it is destroyed.
5. Death and fear will afflict the people of Baghdad and Iraq. A fire will appear in the sky and a redness will cover them.

[Bayonet]

he's got a new race to play with,

I hope it's not The Nutkins!

[Spekio]

Easily opened portals by the hell side made it easy for the DEMONS to send their MASSIVE army into earth. How would it help their invasion?! HOW?!
I mean, it's not like they were trying to invade us or anything.

[Jamesfirecat]

It actually would have been interesting if portals didn't exist, but I digress.

If portals didn't exist then doesn't the really the whole premise of the story go out the window effectively? No portals means now way for demons or angels to get to Earth, no way for us to get to them, and no conflict even after Yahweh delivers his message....

[Gil Hamilton]

The succubi's psychotropic effect isn't that potent, I think; or at least it's a lot less persistent than nerve agents.

The effect of the psychotropic agent itself isn't as potent, but its clear that the amount of chemical present necessarily to trigger the desired effict is on the same order as a nerve agent like VX. Nerve agents have tiny LD50s (VX is 0.14 mg/kg) and so air circulations systems that exist to make chemical weapons* attacks on an office a survivable experience have to be incredibly powerful. If those same systems are needed as full protection against succubi, the median dose of miasma molecule needed for full effect may not as slim as nerve agents, but it's close.

The warm and fuzzy feeling that succubus miasma causes strikes me as very similar to beta-endorphine or some other opioid. If that's true and the miasma is hitting those receptors, high doses of miasma (like, say, licking a succubus while she is sweaty) would be like getting a blast of morphine. You'd be floating for hours. Worse, it may have an addictive quality to it, meaning long term exposure to a succubus might cause some chemical dependence on their presence. This is particularly sinister, given the daemonic penchant for slavery and forming cults.

[Guardsman Bass]

Sure. And sent robots through. Nothing (and I mean nothing) ever came back.

Do they get any sort of signal back once they've stepped into the Minos Portal, or is it just dead silence from whatever they've sent through the instant it goes completely into the portal?

[DataPacRat]

Sure. And sent robots through. Nothing (and I mean nothing) ever came back.

Do they get any sort of signal back once they've stepped into the Minos Portal, or is it just dead silence from whatever they've sent through the instant it goes completely into the portal?

This is kind of why I suggested 'camera on a stick' - push stick in, wait a second, pull on stick, see if anything comes out... for bonus points, fiber-optic thingummy to try to relay any signals impacting the camera's lens...

[Jamesfirecat]

It would be a different story, but the basic premise could remain. The message gets delivered and Satan wants to accelerate his dominion over humanity, so he wants to find ways to kill humans faster - bring them to Hell where he can control them.

There are no portals, but there is still possession, and the dead still have their second lives. So perhaps starting proxy wars (mind control world leaders?) or other more indirect methods to accomplish the same goal.

Meanwhile, Earth would have to figure out wtf is going on and try to find a way to stop it, without direct access. It'd be a real challenge.

The problem with this set up is that it seems to lead to a limited number of outcomes depending on how posession works.

If Hell can possess anyone they want (world leaders) and have a perfect understanding of what they do to those they possess (unlike in this story where possession was mainly grab some smuck with Nephphilliam blood then tell them to go kill some people) the story ends when Satan mind controls enough people to launch nukes and humanity wipes itself out.

If they can perfectly control those they mind control and can pick their targets but can only select those with Neph bloodline then it seems like a cop out that none of the world leaders who could launch nukes do have Neph blood lines or else the above story repeates itself.

If they don't have perfect understanding of who they possess then you get a bunch of random killings, with school shootings and what not going up over the world. Humanity realizes they're conected. Humanity pin points electro magnet signal. Humanity blocks signal with tin foil assuming posession works the same way as in Salvation War.

Either way humanity fiugres out how to eventually turn signal into way from getting from point A to point B and create portals.

Humanity opens up portal shows up on Satan's doorstep (because Satan would have his army dispersed since he wasn't expecting any sort of big battle), kills him.

Humanity then needs to go about bringing hell under control.

To me that just doesn't seem as intresting as the large scale battles you get in Salvation War. Plus, it makes no sense that Hell would somehow have a way to posess people across barier between worlds, be able to see things on the other side of the barrier, and yet not have a way to phsycially go across it.

[Guardsman Bass]

Easily opened portals by the hell side made it easy for the DEMONS to send their MASSIVE army into earth. How would it help their invasion?! HOW?!

That would be great if I was questioning about easily opened portals from the hell side. There are two things I question:

a) Making the hell -> earth huge portal remain open unattended. This doesn't seem to have benefited the demons: if the rules were changed, they could have opened a portal temporarily, marched through it, and closed it behind them.

Instead, it remained open forever, allowing the counterattack to take place.

That was probably on the demons' part. Remember that when they came through the portal with the army for the first time, they were basically expecting a largely unopposed swathe of conquest. They probably figured they could leave the Hellgate Alpha Portal open at their leisure to bring additional people through and send others back, so why close it behind them?

[GrayAnderson]

Re: DataPacRat
Do the Muslims even have a version of Armageddon? I mean, they really have only one prophet, and as prophets go Muhammed was a pretty stable, balanced guy. Not the sort to go off ranting and raving about how the universe was coming to an end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdi and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qiyamah should get you started on the Muslim version of the End Times.

Signs of the Mahdi


According to Moojan Momen, among the most commonly reported signs that presage the advent of the Mahdi in Shia hadith are the following:

1. Before his coming will come the red death and the white death. The red death is the sword and the white death is plague. (See also Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)
2. Several figures will appear: the one-eyed Dajjal, the Sufyani and the Yamani.
3. The Arabs will throw off the reins and take possession of their land, throwing out the authority of the foreigners.
4. There will be a great conflict in the land of Syria until it is destroyed.
5. Death and fear will afflict the people of Baghdad and Iraq. A fire will appear in the sky and a redness will cover them.

Odd question, if I may: Does this "signs list" tend to follow the ancient definition of Syria (which included most of Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon) or the modern one?

[Jamesfirecat]

Plus, it makes no sense that Hell would somehow have a way to posess people across barier between worlds, be able to see things on the other side of the barrier, and yet not have a way to phsycially go across it.

Your analogy covers the "see things" issue, but not the "posses people" issue. At least until somebody figures out a way to create a computer virus which actually infects the person using the computer...


Also I guess our tastes just diverge at this point since one thing I actually like about Salvation War is that it hits just the right (minimal) amount of tension for me where I ask myself the question of "okay what awesome thing is going to happen next?" rather then "how the f*** can we/our heroes survive this?" Its the same reason I like the anime/manga Hellsing.

[Chad]

Remember Yahweh has wrapped up on humanity, he's done with us and consigned us all to Hell. he's got a new race to play with,

I guess I forgot that detail... possibly because I simply don't recall even a hint of what that other race might /be/. Maybe a foreshadowy hint or two about 'fur and prehensile tails' or 'tentacles and color-shifting skin' could be inserted during the editing stage?

If I had to guess who the other race is I would guess the Orcs in Hell. (Not much of a guess really as they are the only other race ever mentioned in Armangendon besides the Angles and Demons.) The fact that orcs are mentioned anymore now that we have conqured Hell leads me to believe that God took them from hell and put them somewhere else for them to worship him. (The orcs tech level and mentality also would fit his requirements so that would be my guess.)

[MKSheppard]

SMURF RIDES AGAIN!

We were looking at pictures of those those big Russian rocket carriers one day at work and wondering if they had any possible civilian application. One idea was to convert them into a sort of Uber-SUV known as the Sports Utility Mobile Home. We then spent a happy few minutes trying to work out an acryonym that would come out as SMURF. The best we could come up with was Sporting Mobile Utility Recreational Facility but we weren't too happy with it.

But if it still had the rocket, think of the drive-by shooting one could pull..........

Super Mobile Universal Recreational Funmobile

Regarding the driveby: first you want a Nike-Hercules as a parking lot ornament, now you want to do drivebys with an ICBM. What's next, 9 megaton alternatives to the shovel for moving earth in the garden?

[Guardsman Bass]

Yeah, maybe. I don't think this was explained in-universe though. If that was the only reason, you have to ask: if the demons could close it at any time, why didn't they close it at the first sign of the tables turning? "Because Satan is an arrogant ass" only goes so far.

You yourself pointed out that a big portal may be a difficult pain the ass to close, so they probably can't close it on a dime. Also, keep in mind that this is a mostly Bronze Age civilization we're talking about; their command-and-control is inefficient and basic as all hell. It is entirely believable that in the chaos that was there after the first wave was decimated, their command quite frankly had no clue what was going on, and couldn't get their act together until it was too late, and the humans had seized the portal. Not to mention with the power of pre-conceived notions going on as well - let's say you're a demon commander, and a bunch of terrified grunts wander in claiming there was a great slaughter by "human magic". Are you going to believe them, particularly if it comes up through a command chain where it's been massaged to the point where the news sounds a lot better than it actually is?

With those portal physics, they might have not decided to close it until it was too late to actually do with their resources - how convenient for the humans.

Shit actually does happen, you know, particularly in a really chaotic situation.

[Guardsman Bass]

You yourself pointed out that a big portal may be a difficult pain the ass to close, so they probably can't close it on a dime.

Yes, indeed. With the in-universe and out of universe rules the way they are, it makes sense that it happened the way it did.

Don't forget, though, the thing that started my off here is Stuart's claims that "every breach or modification of hard science works in favor of the daemons." I'm saying that the rules of portals were made in such a way to make the curbstomp possible - the portal staying open naturally didn't actually help the demons at all. If the initial hellmouth closed behind Abigor's army, or closed if not actively maintained (so the tank goes through, blasts the guard... oops, you just closed the door behind you), the invasion of Hell wouldn't have been nearly as easy.

Does every portal of that size stay open if not manually closed if it's Hell-to-Earth (I thought Uriel's tended to close behind him)? Like I said, I don't see it as that much being a rule being biased towards the humans - the demons certainly could have kept the portals at the point where they could be closed off on a dime (by keeping them much smaller, for instance). That they didn't was a result of their stupidity and ignorance as opposed to a biased rule, particularly since Michael and Heaven didn't make the same mistake - they kept their portals small, and never left them open too long.

But I suppose your basic point is right - not everything works in favor of the demons. If, for example, the portal required constant attention to keep open, it would have been much more favorable to them.

[Sea Skimmer]

You yourself pointed out that a big portal may be a difficult pain the ass to close, so they probably can't close it on a dime.

Yes, indeed. With the in-universe and out of universe rules the way they are, it makes sense that it happened the way it did.

Don't forget, though, the thing that started my off here is Stuart's claims that "every breach or modification of hard science works in favor of the daemons." I'm saying that the rules of portals were made in such a way to make the curbstomp possible - the portal staying open naturally didn't actually help the demons at all. If the initial hellmouth closed behind Abigor's army, or closed if not actively maintained (so the tank goes through, blasts the guard... oops, you just closed the door behind you), the invasion of Hell wouldn't have been nearly as easy.

No it would have become even easier when it was launched by surprise through human portals allowing human armies to roll right into Dis and completely bypass the demon armies! Meanwhile any additional demon invasions of earth would be crushed by carpet bombing all the same. However what would happen is the invasion takes longer before it could be launched, meaning an even better prepared earth army rolls through, and drag on the story for no real purpose as the result is very bit as inevitable as it always was. The longer the war goes on the more and more the advantages shift to humanity. The Demons would have been best off if an earth military force had stumbled into hell first and ran out of ammo fighting them all off, but that occuring would have made little sense.

[Jamesfirecat]

Also if portals were harder to keep open, then Demons wouldn't have been able to execute lava attacks, so forget about the two successful attacks they managed to launch.

[Stuart]

How did Hellgate Alpha staying open work in their favor? Earth->Hell opened portals are pretty iffy too; they can be used to escape earth, but you could have just as well made the escape portals opened up from the hell side too. Neither of those are required by the basic premise and seem to exist only to give tanks an easy road into hell. Without them, a large scale invasion of hell might have been impossible, and it might have looked a lot different. (Perhaps more like Pantheocide?) I'll give you credit of course on the creative use of the portals on both side. That's cool, running with the rules. I'm just questioning the reasoning behind making the rules the way they are in the first place.

We have to go almost back to the start about this since portal science is so fundamental. The way my thought train went was this. The daemons can't just materialize like a Star Trek transporter, it's not compatible with any science I can think of. That pushes us to a portal. Now, all the old mythology talks of daemon armies etc and old legends are full of mention of cities being besieged by monstrous daemons. So we are definately looking at a massive force. That will need a huge portal to get it through (it would take a long, long time to transit a million-daemon army one at a time. So, sending daemon armies to earth would have to use lareg portals. But, if opening such portals was easy from the Earth side, we'd have noticed the science by now. So they have to be very difficult to open from the Earth side. Given this is Bronze age on teh daemon side, the portals have to be relatively easy to open from the Hell side. Then, I got the picture of a sort of "energy flow" down the Dimensions from Universe Three to Universe Two to Universe One and so on. It was easy to open portals going with the flow, but very hard to open portals against it. So, we acheived the object of having portals that were very easy to open from hellside and very hard to open from Earthside. So far so good (and you see what I mean about rigging things in the Daemons favor). Then, I thought about it some more and I got the picture of a saloon door in the "flow". That led me to think that opening a door from Earthside isn't just hard, keeping it open is very hard because the energy flow tends to close it (and that led to teh chain of thought that keeping a portal open from earthside causes the sensitive doing it great pain. Also, by implication, once a portal is opened from Hellside, keeping it open is easy. That's great as well, still favoring daemons you see. Then I thought some more about it and I realized that portals would be variable in size from tiny ones just big enough to let one daemon through to the huge ones used for Abigor's Army. Then, I thought back to the door and realized that the bigger the door, the more it would be affected by the "energy flow". I realized that this would mean that the humans would not only be restricted in the duration of the portals they could open, they would not be able to open big ones either. Still favoring daemons. Then I realized that if the portal was big enough, the daemons wouldn't be able to close it. And that thought concluded the basic development of portal science as backstory.

Note that portal science still heavily favors the daemons - or rather now operating from Hellside. Operating from Hell means the portals can be bigger and more stable and much more easily opened. They are harder to close which is why humans size their just big enough to take one armored vehicle at a time unless they want the portal to be permanent. Closing down a permanent portal has to be done by exploding an EBU-5 Hellside, it doesn't work exploded Earthside.

Making the hell -> earth huge portal remain open unattended. This doesn't seem to have benefited the demons: if the rules were changed, they could have opened a portal temporarily, marched through it, and closed it behind them.

It allowed them to do their volcano attacks (not plausible with easily-closed portals) and was implicit in teh basic concept. Arguably, if they had closed their portal, they would have been trapped on Earth

Instead, it remained open forever, allowing the counterattack to take place.

It didn't allow it, it eased it. Humans could have eventually found a way of punching in, especially if the daemonic army tried to form portals to escape rather than retreating to one. To be really nasty, the war could have ended with humans simply forming portals and pushing multi-megaton nukes in until Hell was fried. Capturing a portal forced thew ar to a conventional land battle. By the way, notice that portal capture was an important part of the Great Celestial War and teh other skirmishes.

Making Earth -> Hell portals possible. While this makes it easier for demons to make their own escape paths (if they are capable of it without machines anyway, I don't recall), the main purpose it seemed to serve was to make inserting troops and supplies into Hell easier for the humans.

It would be very hard to think of a reason why transit one way should be easy, the other way impossible. I bent things far enough giving daemons the easy portal-forming job and humans a hard job.

[Stuart]

[Do they get any sort of signal back once they've stepped into the Minos Portal, or is it just dead silence from whatever they've sent through the instant it goes completely into the portal?

Nothing at all comes back, just dead silence. Push in a stick and it ends at the point where the stick hit the Minos Portal. If there was a camera on the end, it vanishes. If somebody steps through they are never seen again. If they put a leg through, they spend their lives with one leg thereafter. This won't change by the way. The Minos Portal is scary.

[Land Phish]

If I had to guess who the other race is I would guess the Orcs in Hell. (Not much of a guess really as they are the only other race ever mentioned in Armangendon besides the Angles and Demons.) The fact that orcs are mentioned anymore now that we have conqured Hell leads me to believe that God took them from hell and put them somewhere else for them to worship him. (The orcs tech level and mentality also would fit his requirements so that would be my guess.)

Were there Orcs in Abrahamic mythology? The first I ever heard of them was from Lord of the Rings. Also that's kind of a raw deal how we have to share our afterlife with them. Unless Orcs are indigenous to Hell, in which case I suppose it's the other way around, and also raises the question of what happens when things are born in Hell. Things like humans. Are Hell-babies also basically the same as the deceased, or are they different somehow?

[Kodiak]

[Do they get any sort of signal back once they've stepped into the Minos Portal, or is it just dead silence from whatever they've sent through the instant it goes completely into the portal?

Nothing at all comes back, just dead silence. Push in a stick and it ends at the point where the stick hit the Minos Portal. If there was a camera on the end, it vanishes. If somebody steps through they are never seen again. If they put a leg through, they spend their lives with one leg thereafter. This won't change by the way. The Minos Portal is scary.

Sounds like Hell can still have Capital Punishment- Oblivion.

[Guardsman Bass]

[Do they get any sort of signal back once they've stepped into the Minos Portal, or is it just dead silence from whatever they've sent through the instant it goes completely into the portal?

Nothing at all comes back, just dead silence. Push in a stick and it ends at the point where the stick hit the Minos Portal. If there was a camera on the end, it vanishes. If somebody steps through they are never seen again. If they put a leg through, they spend their lives with one leg thereafter. This won't change by the way. The Minos Portal is scary.

Sounds like Hell can still have Capital Punishment- Oblivion.

Depends. We know that the angels can somehow reach into the Stream of Souls and pull them out to be in Heaven, so maybe after Heaven is taken, they can give us some idea of what the Stream is like (or at least their part of it).

[GrayAnderson]

[Do they get any sort of signal back once they've stepped into the Minos Portal, or is it just dead silence from whatever they've sent through the instant it goes completely into the portal?

Nothing at all comes back, just dead silence. Push in a stick and it ends at the point where the stick hit the Minos Portal. If there was a camera on the end, it vanishes. If somebody steps through they are never seen again. If they put a leg through, they spend their lives with one leg thereafter. This won't change by the way. The Minos Portal is scary.

So...basically, there's a "wall of vanishing" (i.e. a line past which stuff just effectively ceases to exist), so to speak? And lots of people who then wake up are being spewed out by this thing?

Pardon me for asking, but I am wondering how conservation of mass is gotten around/ignored by this. Given the attention to detail made to ensuring that the portals couldn't be made into perpetual motion machines, I am quite curious on this front.

Also, it just struck me that the delivery service which uses portals is likely to have a lot of trouble shipping from Denver to Boston,if you will.