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GrayAnderson wrote:Two more excellent chapters, Stuart. I applaud...and I am enjoying the twists you slip in there.

Edit: And the party at that club just struck me as an ironic version of a hurricane party...where holding the party actually does help people survive.

Edit 2: A question does arise, if I might: Holidays of religious extraction are a large part of the social and cultural life of a lot of nations. They also play a significant role in the economy. What exactly has happened to Christmas (and the like) in this world? If they were strictly religious, I'd be a bit more certain of their demise, but in light of the highly commercial nature of them I'm curious.

So far there hasn't been a Christmas since the Message, but I'm guessing it'll devolve into a more family-oriented Yule, kinda like a Mardis Gras 2.0 with presents.

Looks like I was right about how having a rider would mean that Fluffy can't just be straffed to death from the air, at least not until we can get some supersonic fighters in to take down his rider, something that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

That said I have a big question, I know it's important to keep moral up, but Uriel's attacks work by causing a person's heart to stop beating, right? With that in mind, should people really be drinking alcohol while they're being attacked by him? Something that slows the heart down and weakens your ability to concentrate seems like a great way of doing Uriel's job for him, or at least making it easier. Of course I could be wrong, but has anyone considered that drinking might be a bad idea much like how in real life those Saint Bernards (I think that's the breed) which rescue people in the mountains don't really have a bottle of liquor strapped to their necks since drinking liquor slows down the heart and thus makes it easier to die of hypothermia?

CaptainChewbacca wrote:So far there hasn't been a Christmas since the Message, but I'm guessing it'll devolve into a more family-oriented Yule, kinda like a Mardis Gras 2.0 with presents.

Or whatever they do in Japan. Yet another excuse to eat cake!

On the issue of what happened to Christmas allow me to suggest my own replacement ritual of celebration...

Happy Capitalism day! Yes Capitalism day, the day where you show the people you really love that while you can't put a price tag on feelings of goodwill and affection, you sure can try!

Ravseren Daniel Orlevaw? Am I imagining things or is that supposed to be reminiscent of the name of Asimov's robot detective?

tortieconspiracy wrote:Ravseren Daniel Orlevaw? Am I imagining things or is that supposed to be reminiscent of the name of Asimov's robot detective?

I thought that name felt familiar, but the first word was close enough to "Reverend" that I was a bit thrown off.

And as to Christmas...yeah, I can see that. I can actually see a bunch of the winter festivals rolling into one big commercialized madhouse from late December to early February.

Uh... guys? There has been a Christmas, it was a plot point in the beginning whereby it was used as a giant "FUCK YOU" to Yawheh. So, I fully expect Christmas to eventually be spent with families going to Osama's Pot and Commie Homobortion Jizzporium whereby we celebrate kicking in Yay-yay's balls via debauchery and commercialism, thus bringing us full circle to the origins of the holiday in the first place.

So, I fully expect Christmas to eventually be spent with families going to Osama's Pot and Commie Homobortion Jizzporium whereby we celebrate kicking in Yay-yay's balls via debauchery and commercialism, thus bringing us full circle to the origins of the holiday in the first place.

While I'm as much for commercialism and duchebaggery as the next visitor of Obama's Pot and Commie Homobortion Jizzporium , doesn't the true roots of the yuel festival also have something to with fertility, you know, hence why we needed the 'bortions....

Well commercialism is merely a modern extension of a desire for wealth, its just that fertile soil and many children are no longer the path there. Plus, we know the sun will come back, its just its freaking depressing in the northern hemisphere when it gets that dark, so we need an excuse to party.

Mr Bean wrote:Combat! Interesting read and it looks like Fluffy the 2nd is doing better than Fluffy the 1st

Only because Fluffy is fighting a relatively undefended target. So far, all Fluffy and its rider did was pollute the desert, knock over a few buildings, crumple a plane and gas some soldiers. I doubt the Whore will even pay attention to the obviously weak truck that will ram it. or anticipate the amount of ordinance that will rain down upon the bitch. Right now, she's arrogant enough to think herself and her Kaijuu invincible, as if she was back in the Bronze Age.

It'll only be a matter of time before shells and rockets treat her the way she deserves to be treated, and I have a feeling that it'll come at the worst possible time for her (when she's tearing down yet another wall, or deliberately start showing off).

As for Urinal, well, let's face it. He's pretty much fucked.

GrayAnderson wrote: A question does arise, if I might: Holidays of religious extraction are a large part of the social and cultural life of a lot of nations. They also play a significant role in the economy. What exactly has happened to Christmas (and the like) in this world? If they were strictly religious, I'd be a bit more certain of their demise, but in light of the highly commercial nature of them I'm curious.

Most of the Christian holidays were actually hijacked earlier festivals so I guess they would revert to type. Christmas would die out to be replace by Saturnalia in the second or third week in December, a mid-winter binge to cheer everybody up. Easter would be replaced by Eostre, technically a celebration of the arrival of spring and the planting of crops. Then, there would be Salvation Day of course, fixed as the day Hell surrendered, a joyous day and the first worldwide holiday. Military parades, fireworks and people visiting their dead relatives. Harvest Festival would return when everybody would have a day eating themselves senseless (like the US Thanksgiving). Then there would be peculiarly national holidays like Guy Fawks Day in the UK or Thanksgiving (renamed Turkey Day which is what everybody calls it anyway) in the US. I should think that most countries would have quite a bit of fun evolving their holidays.

jamesfirecat wrote:That said I have a big question, I know it's important to keep moral up, but Uriel's attacks work by causing a person's heart to stop beating, right? With that in mind, should people really be drinking alcohol while they're being attacked by him? Something that slows the heart down and weakens your ability to concentrate seems like a great way of doing Uriel's job for him, or at least making it easier. Of course I could be wrong, but has anyone considered that drinking might be a bad idea much like how in real life those Saint Bernards (I think that's the breed) which rescue people in the mountains don't really have a bottle of liquor strapped to their necks since drinking liquor slows down the heart and thus makes it easier to die of hypothermia?

Uriel's attacks work by suppressing the autonomic nervous system which controls how the body functions. The attack stops functions that include heart rate, digestion, respiration rate, salivation, perspiration, diameter of the pupils, micturition (urination), and sexual arousal. The really critical ones are heart rate and breathing. Essentially, if somebody is caught unawares (as most people were before the critical importance of wearing a tinfoil had was realized) people simply forgot to keep their hearts beating and forgot to breathe. So they died. So, drinking is probably a bad idea in and of itself. However, there's another side to this. The best defense against a Uriel attack is for peple to gather together in groups and look after each other, to watch each other and help them Anything that promotes group solidarity is a good thing and communal boozing (in moderation) does that. What inspired this are the legends (that go right back in time) of communities that were threatened by some hideous monster from outside and saved themselves by gathering together under cover and supporting each other. Like the old mead halls and so on. I'm suggesting that those legends were actually folk memories of communities that survived Uriel attacks and the stories are efforts by those who survived to tell others how they could do likewise.

Fighting off Uriel is a real achievement. Try sitting for a minute or two, keeping thinking "heart keep beating, heart keep beating" and imagine that if your mind drifts off to something else, you'll die. Then imagine doing that for an hour or more. If somebody is on their own, its almost impossible but if they have somebody with them who can watch and prod them if they start to drift away, its much easier.

Ravseren Daniel Orlevaw? Am I imagining things or is that supposed to be reminiscent of the name of Asimov's robot detective?

Ravseren is actually the Israeli equivalent of major. But the rest is reminiscent yes. It's a shout-out.

Stuart wrote:What inspired this are the legends (that go right back in time) of communities that were threatened by some hideous monster from outside and saved themselves by gathering together under cover and supporting each other. Like the old mead halls and so on. I'm suggesting that those legends were actually folk memories of communities that survived Uriel attacks and the stories are efforts by those who survived to tell others how they could do likewise.

Leave it to Stuart to tie a Christian archangel to Viking legends! And, perhaps, drop a hint on humanity's next "five year mission" after Michael's suborned like Abigor and Yah-Yah's turned into random atoms. If my conjecture is, indeed, Stuart's path, I can see the Aesir becoming humanity's staunch allies as we take on the Indian pantheon. We'll save Ra, Isis and Quetzalcoatl for later. If any human-invented deities respect and honor the sheer ability to kick ass, it's the Norse gods! Excellent work, Mr. Stuart.

shame al-sohl's gonna die. I kinda liked him. The dude has balls of steel

Well, don't worry. I'm sure he'll go to Hell afterward, so it's not that bad.

EDIT: You know, I just realized how utterly hilarious what I just typed sounds out of context.

how is the truck gonna do damage? My guess he'll blow up fluffy's leg, causing it to fall 200 feet, or the israeli's will transport him to where Dumah is, and he'll blow her to hell, crippling fluffy, and leaving him further to more truck bombs, I'm sure there are more. Anyway, Al-Sohl deserves to be immortalized; they immortalized that mall guard and while what he did was cool, it pales in comparison to weakening one of heaven's ultimate weapons so it can be destroyed. The fact that he made the decision to sacrifice himself as soon as he realized what was happening is more then can be said for a lot of other people.

You know, I bet if al-Sohl pulls this off, he'll get just about whatever he can name when he turns up in Hell. He might even get his seventy-two virgins after all.

The discussion of Nero becoming the Ron Jeremy of hell got me thinking that some of the gods might want to get into the porn industry. I can see it now, Zeus just railing some chick, demanding to know "Who's your deity?"

PhilosopherOfSorts wrote:The discussion of Nero becoming the Ron Jeremy of hell got me thinking that some of the gods might want to get into the porn industry. I can see it now, Zeus just railing some chick, demanding to know "Who's your deity?"

Also, he'll be able to do it in any form he wishes. It'll be the first time a bull is in porn and it will technically not be bestiality. He just has to watch out for Hera.

Come to think of it, couldn't the Greek Gods polymorph humans? I can just see Dionysus or Hermes starting a business giving easy boob jobs, enlarging penises and switching genders for those who want them. They'll be the richest deities who ever lived.

i haven't seen ron jeremy, but the idea of nero doing him makes me want to claw out my eyes.

Eulogy wrote:Come to think of it, couldn't the Greek Gods polymorph humans? I can just see Dionysus or Hermes starting a business giving easy boob jobs, enlarging penises and switching genders for those who want them. They'll be the richest deities who ever lived.

Well, yeah, they could go about things like this, but I'd bet that the various gods out there would be too set in their ways to start serving humans. With the exception of only a few that we've seen so far, the guys at the top of the food chain have a really hard time adjusting to the idea of humans as anything more than pathetic lifeforms.

SCRawl wrote:

Eulogy wrote:Come to think of it, couldn't the Greek Gods polymorph humans? I can just see Dionysus or Hermes starting a business giving easy boob jobs, enlarging penises and switching genders for those who want them. They'll be the richest deities who ever lived.

Well, yeah, they could go about things like this, but I'd bet that the various gods out there would be too set in their ways to start serving humans. With the exception of only a few that we've seen so far, the guys at the top of the food chain have a really hard time adjusting to the idea of humans as anything more than pathetic lifeforms.

They could just think of money as the new 'sacrifice' and looking at the myths, they weren't shy about giving mortals favor provided with the right incentive.

Stuart wrote:
Most of the Christian holidays were actually hijacked earlier festivals so I guess they would revert to type. Christmas would die out to be replace by Saturnalia in the second or third week in December, a mid-winter binge to cheer everybody up.

See this is where I disagree. Christmas much like in the future will be replaced by Xmas, same Holiday, same patron Saint (Santa) and a new legend will spring up that Santa lives in the North Pole Dimension/ Bubble Universe where use portal technology to visit all the homes of the good little children and give them Presents. We can have Abigor put on the beard and the Santa suit for PR purposes.

See this is where I disagree. Christmas much like in the future will be replaced by Xmas, same Holiday, same patron Saint (Santa) and a new legend will spring up that Santa lives in the North Pole Dimension/ Bubble Universe where use portal technology to visit all the homes of the good little children and give them Presents. We can have Abigor put on the beard and the Santa suit for PR purposes.

May I axe you a question? How do you cram so much win into so little space?

Jamesfirecat wrote: May I axe you a question? How do you cram so much win into so little space?

Long hours at the mill that's how.

OAN, if I had money free at the moment I might commission one of the board's resident artists to bring that amazing vision to life of Abigor, Ruler of Hell... Part time off-season Mall Santa.

Regarding the Civil Defense sirens (I always preferred that name--in most of the midwest, remember, people don't think of them as air raid sirens, they think of them as tornado sirens) in part 37 (yeah, I'm a bit late)...

Most of Los Angeles's old siren network, though not maintained since probably the 80s, is still in place, and consists largely of the old electromechanical sirens like the Federal Signal "Thunderbolt." Though they'd need heavy refurbishment at this point, at least the omnidirectional sirens could probably be put back into service fairly quickly.

Depending on how much time it would take from Uriel's portal starting to form to his arrival, the older sirens might well stop sounding before he got there--the control boards were built to sound any of the available signals for three minutes, then shut down, unless a new command was given to them while they were firing. (i.e., if you hit the "attack warning" button during the three minutes the "alert" signal was being sent out, it would switch over.)

The older sirens had either two or three signals, depending on how much the city was willing to spend on them. The "alert" signal ("White Warning" in the UK) was the continuous steady tone that was also used as a weather warning signal in tornado-prone areas, and was meant to warn people to be prepared for a possible attack; it was also used after an "attack warning" signal to indicate that conditions were all-clear. The "attack warning" signal (UK "Red Warning") was the iconic rising-and-falling wail tone, used to warn that an attack was imminent (i.e., not just possible, but certain to happen within 20 minutes). All sirens had these two signals, as they could be done simply through controlling how fast the rotor was spun.

The optional third signal was, depending on the type of siren, either a "pulsed" steady tone (UK "Grey Warning"), or a "Hi-Lo" signal that sounds like the classic European emergency vehicle siren. These were both done the same way, with solenoids operating a shutter that blocked the opening in the siren stator from the amplifying horn; on a single-tone siren, you'd get the pulsed signal, while a dual-tone would (usually) have the hi-lo instead. This optional signal could be used for any purpose--most often to call a volunteer fire department's personnel to the station, back in the days before mobile phones.

Of course, modern electronic sirens, being basically just huge low-fidelity speaker stacks, can generate any signal you want to feed into them (Whelen stores its standard signals as MP3s, and has them available on its website for your listening pleasure), even speech. Most likely, DHS would have determined which older sirens in the LA area were still operable, then filled in all the holes and gaps with new electronic ones. (Replacing the older ones might not be an option at this point, what with the all the municipalities that have let their siren networks go to hell since the end of the Cold War suddenly needing to get them up and running again; the manufacturers might well be completely swamped with orders.)

Anyhow, the point of this huge wall-o-text is really that, most likely, the initial portal-forming warning signal would probably be the "alert" steady-tone, with the sirens switching to the "attack" wail when Uriel comes through, and either another "alert" signal or a third signal being sounded as an all-clear after the attack is over. Also note that, today, siren networks are integrated into the rest of the public warning system; the Emergency Alert System (in the US) would doubtless be used to issue attack warnings over radio and television, as one of the federal requirements for broadcasters, cable companies, and satellite providers is that EAS activation has to automatically interrupt all programming in the market it's activated for. (This is why, sometimes, if you're watching TV late at night, your cable system will be hijacked completely for a Required Monthly Test...)

(Also, hi there, new user, registered because of Salvation War, after some fighting with my ISP regarding getting the activation email through to me...)