Wapsi Square Forum

Something's bugging me: when Monica first went to the Bibliothiki, Phix told her that it was thousands of years older than the Great Library at Alexandria.

When the Library recognized Monica as the new Jaguar Girl, Tsillah said that they had just witnessed the birth of the first new sub-titan in over a million years...

So how can there be a book in the Library, written by a previous Jaguar Girl, when the Library was not there to collect books at the time? Does it also collect anything that was written before it even was founded?

*shrug*

MST3K mantra?

My serious answer is this: The Library exists in it's own plane of reality. I think it was once described as "Limbo," but I don't think it's the same Limbo as the "in between heaven and hell" limbo. Time in the library isn't congruent to earth or Milky Way time. So, according to how I understand it, the library is existing outside of our time. Trying to compare measurements of time between earth/Milky Way and The Library is kind of an apples to oranges scenario.

Simple explanation: The Previous Jaguar Girl wasn't a sub-Titan.

(innocently sips on my coffee from Mucho Mocha)

jwhouk wrote:Simple explanation: The Previous Jaguar Girl wasn't a sub-Titan.

(innocently sips on my coffee from Mucho Mocha)

What jwhouk said.

Julie wrote:

jwhouk wrote:Simple explanation: The Previous Jaguar Girl wasn't a sub-Titan.

(innocently sips on my coffee from Mucho Mocha)

What jwhouk said.

Right! Because Monica isn't just a Jaguar Girl, she's also someone with Phoenix blood, a Glyph Reader, and a Demon Shepherd.

GlytchMeister wrote:*shrug*

MST3K mantra?

That, or the ever popular "A Wizard did it," or "It's Magic!"

GlytchMeister wrote:My serious answer is this: The Library exists in it's own plane of reality. I think it was once described as "Limbo," but I don't think it's the same Limbo as the "in between heaven and hell" limbo. Time in the library isn't congruent to earth or Milky Way time. So, according to how I understand it, the library is existing outside of our time. Trying to compare measurements of time between earth/Milky Way and The Library is kind of an apples to oranges scenario.

Probably something like that...

GlytchMeister wrote:

Julie wrote:

jwhouk wrote:Simple explanation: The Previous Jaguar Girl wasn't a sub-Titan.

(innocently sips on my coffee from Mucho Mocha)

What jwhouk said.

Right! Because Monica isn't just a Jaguar Girl, she's also someone with Phoenix blood, a Glyph Reader, and a Demon Shepherd.

Ah, but: "... the last [Jaguar Girl] I [Jet's Guidance] know of was before this universe."

While it is not entirely impossible that there was another Jaguar Girl whom Guidance did not know, it's more likely that there was no other one, and that this then rules out the possibility of another Jaguar Girl's book being in the Library, no matter how old the Library is. Unless, of course, the Library already has copies of future books (which then sparks a whole debate about determinism... ), and this book is either from another, future Jaguar Girl, or even from Monica herself, at a future time (which then sparks a debate about causality loops... )

Still, wherever it came from, it's a neat plot device, seeing as no one has volunteered so far to show Monica how to use any of the other powers that are available to her, which she does not know yet...

I went with the book because I find superheroes who just happen to know how to use their powers when they get them oh-so-irritating.
And "instinct" feels like a cop-out.

This is a mirror to John's problem, which is his power is bursting at the seams. He needs to learn how to control it.

Little bit of "foil" action happening. It's part of why I think Monica is a great choice to teach John.

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

I've noticed something about the end of many of my posts in Purpose. A lot of them are Cliffhangers.
I don't know if this is a problem. I'm not even really trying to make cliffhangers. I am trying to make good stopping points. I guess good stopping points tend to be cliffhangers?
*shrug*

Got three posts done in fairly quick succession... One last night and two today. Probably going to get two more done if my brain holds up.

I recall reading someone say that this question of breaking/stopping points was one of the difficulties that some "serious" SF authors had, when they were asked to write for the original Star Trek. The structure of a TV show pretty much requires a dramatic pause at certain very specific points in the story, so that the viewers can be pitched on the benefits of buying the new grapefruit-flavored version of Pulp cereal (or whatever) and run off to the loo. Apparently, some good, established writers find their own style of pacing just doesn't get along with the fixed framing of a TV show.

So, you sorta really do need at least a mini-cliffhanger at some point in a story that you're present in an episodic fashion. Otherwise, it would be a lot like having to st

GlytchMeister wrote:AUTHOR'S NOTES:

I've noticed something about the end of many of my posts in Purpose. A lot of them are Cliffhangers.
I don't know if this is a problem. I'm not even really trying to make cliffhangers. I am trying to make good stopping points. I guess good stopping points tend to be cliffhangers?
*shrug*

Got three posts done in fairly quick succession... One last night and two today. Probably going to get two more done if my brain holds up.

Whenever possible, end each chapter on a cliffhanger or a good joke... or a good healthy cry, either heartbreak or warm fuzzies. Vary the formula

One other small point of order: Charon stated specifically, "All this death and not one soul to take over the Styx." The suggestion was that all the souls were obliterated by the Chimera.

jwhouk wrote:One other small point of order: Charon stated specifically, "All this death and not one soul to take over the Styx." The suggestion was that all the souls were obliterated by the Chimera.

Crap.

It's salvageable. I'm already brewing a solution to the issue. Just gotta let it cook a bit more.

*drops bottle of water (the universal solvent) into the pun jar*

Done! I figured it out.
...
Had to use some "exact words" to get around some things, but I did it!
I added another chunk of questionable poetry to boot.

Thank you, Loremaster jwhouk, for pointing that out. I hope the fix I made works.

GlytchMeister wrote:Thank you, Loremaster jwhouk, for pointing that out. I hope the fix I made works.

The distinction between a person's soul, and their shade? There's definite precedent for that in some mythologies (old Chinese beliefs about a person having multiple souls of different types) and in some theories about ghosts and hauntings (these being a sort of psychometric "imprint" or "memory" or "photograph", left by a traumatic death, and seperate from the soul of the person involved).

I imagine that the dust-of-madness-and-damnation must be nasty stuff, requiring cautionary labels on the outside of the trucks hauling it down the highway...

It's... More like the souls were destroyed, but the... stuff remained. Just as souls look like humans in the underworld, so too do the burnt remains of the souls appear to be ashes and charred bones.

A good analogue for what they might look like could be the bodies found in the boathouse of Herculaneum, but blacker. Those people got fried by a pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius during the same eruption that buried Pompeii in ash.
Their flesh was burnt clean off, and their bones were blackened and charred.

However, the souls were destroyed. There was nothing left for Charon to ferry across. The ashes of the souls worked a bit like the Mapimi Stone Tape, recording the madness of those who died.

Furthermore, as the scorched remnants of the Lanthian souls drifted through the Void and through the Styx (the river of hate), these remains mixed with each other. So the Stone Tape effect got all scrambled. All individuality was lost. Kinda like a complete mind-meld of an entire civilization's worth of evil people.

Nasty, huh?

Even worse, souls aren't like flesh. They aren't constructed with the expectation that they will suffer damage. It takes a kind of destructive power so rare that souls simply don't have ways to cope built in.
Flesh heals. Souls don't. Flesh blisters and knits and scars. But any damage sustained by a soul continues to hurt for eternity.
And these souls suffered so much damage they got as close to dying as a dead soul can get.

That is a whole lot of pain.

So, the summarize: eternal, unbearable pain. Madness in life, exacerbated by death by Chimera, loss of individuality, and eternal pain. Incomplete personalities to start with, as only the strongest emotions and wills are recorded by the Stone Tape method. What was recorded was all the bad stuff that happens when a person is violently killed by a raging monster of hate and anger, and is killed so hard their souls are FUBAR'd.

In short: not pleasant. If this was put on a truck, they'd need several of those little diamond-shaped warning signs. And they'd have to invent new ones for stuff like "Distilled Insanity", "Concentrated Hatred", and "Emotionally Toxic".

GlytchMeister wrote:In short: not pleasant. If this was put on a truck, they'd need several of those little diamond-shaped warning signs. And they'd have to invent new ones for stuff like "Distilled Insanity", "Concentrated Hatred", and "Emotionally Toxic".

You have a dreadfully poignant imagination there. The stuff you're describing sounds almost as awful as AM talk radio.

Why, thank you. I do try my best.
...
I am getting a bit tired of all the grimdark I'm writing. Oh well. The show must go on.