The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Eighty One Up

[Jamesfirecat]

Wonder if XY Executive Solutions might at any time have been related to a company named Dark Liquid....

[Darth Yan]

how are the angels going to dry up a river and set off a quake. If It's biblical they are probably aiming for 12 on the richter scale. If the hailstones and earthquake cause enough damage an invasion might work. Also, we don't know the power of the dragon

[Setzer]

Wonder if XY Executive Solutions might at any time have been related to a company named Dark Liquid....

XE and Executive Outcomes. In fact, I think Blackwater changed their name to XE.

[Pelranius]

Wonder if XY Executive Solutions might at any time have been related to a company named Dark Liquid....

XE and Executive Outcomes. In fact, I think Blackwater changed their name to XE.

The commercial sounded like one of the smaller, second string PMCs. If Xe and the other big PMCs still exist (meaning they haven't been folded up into the military proper) they've probably got a lot more important things to do for the government than spending time on what essentially amounts to bounty hunting.

[Peptuck]

I'm willing to bet that the last Bowl will simply involve the angels opening very high-elevation portals over major population centers and tossing big rocks through.

I'm also willing to bet that DIMON will start countering Michael's use of Heaven->Hell->Earth portals by setting up a Hell-wide network of portal monitoring stations, though they'll need to cover a lot of ground to pull that off.

[Sea Skimmer]

If I lived downstream of the Atatürk Dam, I’d be getting mighty nervous about that next bowl of wrath.

[tim31]

Hell Skim, why not include the Aswan, the Three Gorges, the Hoover...

[Pelranius]

Hell Skim, why not include the Aswan, the Three Gorges, the Hoover...

I wonder if the Sixth Bowl involves using portals to reroute the water. It would probably be too risky to try to dump the Euphrates on say, Damascus but flooding Hell with water is going to be at least a minor annoyance (if nothing else, think of the environmental damage that would be caused by drying up rivers messing with riparian ecosystems and saltwater getting all over the place).

[Sea Skimmer]

Hell Skim, why not include the Aswan, the Three Gorges, the Hoover...

Because those aren’t on the Euphrates? If I started thinking about other dams, the Mosul dam would be next on my list because not only is it already ready to collapse on its own, but its collapse could and totally halt Iraqi oil production besides all the people it killed. No oil from Iraq be a huge blow to the world war economy. The Atatürk dam failing would have a similar effect, though not as a total, but it would also cause far more other destruction as it demolished the cascade of other dams downstream. Concrete dams like Three Gorges would be much harder to destroy then earth ones, and I don't think its too likely the angles can come up with a way to do it, unless they can open portals inside solid rock.

The reason I suspect dams will fall is because while that doesn’t make a river run dry up front, in Iraq it would mean the Euphrates would nearly dry up in the summers. Those dams were built to control the natural drought-flood cycle after all.

[tim31]

I guess; although you've got to admit that the annihilation of population centres along the lower Nile by a surge of water would be good drama.

[Sea Skimmer]

It would be, but Egypt is frankly, expendable to the human cause. They don’t produce much and they have no vital resources other then the Suez Canal, which would be unaffected. So it seems much more likely that an attack would be directed at a place that it would do more useful damage. Destroying the Three Gorges Dam would be ideal, since it would wipe out so much Chinese industry and kill even more people then Aswan, but it’s hard to see a way it could be knocked out being an absurdly giant mass of concrete.

Earthen dams would be easier to destroy, because the angles could do something simple but deadly to, them, like open a portal that dumps a river flow onto the face of the dam, quickly eroding a breach. Then the dams own water can takeover the job of destroying it and unleashing a huge flood. Our only defense against this would be to close the portal before a fatal level of damage is done, but that could be only a matter of minutes.

[CaptainChewbacca]

One thing I noticed; Ted Kennedy died and was no longer legally a senator. Any chance that will change anytime soon? Or that deceased representatives can serve out their term via teleconferencing.

[Omega Scythe]

The way I see it, the Sixth Bowl looks like it's going to be a particularly ripe setting for conflict between Yahweh and Michael-Lan, with attack-effectiveness clashing with Yahweh's need to stick to the book. Either way, I'm still praying it turns out to be a dud of a bowl, simply because I want to see Michael grind his teeth for once, instead of being the cunning evil mastermind behind it all. I have yet to see Michael experience the first true feelings of defeat, and I eagerly await to see how he takes it.

[SCRawl]

One thing I noticed; Ted Kennedy died and was no longer legally a senator. Any chance that will change anytime soon? Or that deceased representatives can serve out their term via teleconferencing.

I can't see that changing. Once a person is dead (or, rather, on his "second life") they really don't have to interface much with the first-lifers. It's difficult to know that a senator would take the concerns of his constituents quite as seriously if they no longer even share the same plane of existence. Death seems a reasonable place to end a person's employment.

[Sean Mulligan]

That Guardian Angel ad sounds like a scam. Why would the military allow a bunchof armed civilians to go in front of them and get in their way?

[Land Phish]

So once the bowls of wrath have finished Jesus is supposed to come back to lead the fight against "evil" right? From what I've seen of the dude that is potentially the worst move Yahweh could make in this entire war.

[Stuart Mackey]

Lamb Beast? Oh no! Is NZ to be pestered to death by a huge hungry bleating lamb? or are our 30 million or so sheep about to revolt?

[Gil Hamilton]

That Guardian Angel ad sounds like a scam. Why would the military allow a bunchof armed civilians to go in front of them and get in their way?

Of course its a scam. There is no way to demonstrate the identity of a supposed guardian angel that was supposed to be protecting you but was negligent in its duties, so at no point does the company have to do anything. Well, other than collect premiums from the stupid. However, fraud is one of the corner stones of the free market and people have never let things like a war stop them from profiteering on human misery.

[Jamesfirecat]

That Guardian Angel ad sounds like a scam. Why would the military allow a bunchof armed civilians to go in front of them and get in their way?

Of course its a scam. There is no way to demonstrate the identity of a supposed guardian angel that was supposed to be protecting you but was negligent in its duties, so at no point does the company have to do anything. Well, other than collect premiums from the stupid. However, fraud is one of the corner stones of the free market and people have never let things like a war stop them from profiteering on human misery.

Lisa, I'd like to buy your magic rock!

(Home Simpsons, purchasing a "magic rock" which "keeps tigers away" because there aren't any nearby while his daughter holds it)

Edit: On a more philosophical note, one could argue what is war but seeking to make a profit from human misery....

[Pelranius]

Lamb Beast? Oh no! Is NZ to be pestered to death by a huge hungry bleating lamb? or are our 30 million or so sheep about to revolt?

I'd be more worried about Scotland. It's possible that the sheep there could storm a RAF or RN base and steal themselves a pair of nukes.

Seriously I think that either the Lamb or Dragon is going to be unleashed on a major industrial area, like the Pearl Delta River region, the factories around Omsk or some petrochemical facilities.

[Ritterin Sophia]

You're a right bastard Stuart! Wait until right after I go to bed to post a new chapter.

[Shroom Man 777]

Very nice. Now that I think of it, the situation the humans are facing in Pantheocide is rather cool - the complete opposite of what happened in Armageddon. Instead of destroying the enemy with ease, humanity's stuck twiddling its thumbs while Heaven throws shit at us with impunity. Damn!

[Highlord Laan]

Very nice. Now that I think of it, the situation the humans are facing in Pantheocide is rather cool - the complete opposite of what happened in Armageddon. Instead of destroying the enemy with ease, humanity's stuck twiddling its thumbs while Heaven throws shit at us with impunity. Damn!

However, aside from regional misery, all Heaven is managing to do is piss humankind off more.

[Ilya Muromets]

Now those rocks could really be a big annoyance. Depending on the size, even nuclear-tipped SAMs would just break them up into a rain of a lot of now-radioactive smaller rocks. Pretty much the same real life problem the nuke-to-an-incoming-asteroid scenario faces, on a less cosmic scale.

[Shroom Man 777]

Where and how the hell do the angels get a rock that big, carry it up, and throw it down a portal?