#nacranswered

[nacricissa]

Thanks for the appreciation! Is there any idea or wip or character I've commented about that maybe you'd like to hear of as a give-something-back gift for making me smile in a sad afternoon?

I was drawn in primarily by your demon polycule (that one line of like “no it’s not just the demon that was recently possessing me that likes you, I do to you nonce”, perfection).

Since I’m more of a worldbuilding girlie than a plot girlie- from where is a demon’s power derived? Do different demons generally have unique abilities? Are there some they all have?

[nacricissa]

eric seems very interesting !! how exactly does a vampire become a vampire hunter

The key is that he’s not just a vampire; he’s a Nihil, which is a hybrid between a vampire and a wraith. He is in fact one of the handful of patient zeros for both epidemics. Instead of being turned, he was directly infected pre birth by the Phantoms that are the gods’ (of darkness and faith respectively) attempts to escape their joint prison. A wraith is the god of darkness’s attempt and has a deficit of faith and surplus of darkness. A vampire is the opposite. As a result, being both balances out into an ability to pass for human.

As for how he became a vampire hunter, the reason his mother was so near the gods’ prison is because she has a strong interest in the occult. When her husband dies (of vampirism) she is relatively easily drawn in by Mlle Nefara, an occult grifter who did not quite realize how real the stories she was making up were. She’d called the unexplained deaths of various heirs’s and heiress’s the work of vampires. Her existing order of vampire hunters, with their complex rituals and catty infighting are certainly unprepared.

[nacricissa]

hello !! which of ur ocs is the most affectionate? gimme some cute examples of things they do

None of the main cast can really be said to be affectionate. So we’re going into secondary cast.: Brig. Brig is primarily a curious person, and expressions of eir affection usually come in the form of seemingly random questions the answers to which ey will never forget. As ey gets older, eir methods get more refined (well less and then more, as moving into an unfamiliar society on the other side of the Globe will do). Ey begins to tailor eir expressions of gratitude/affection to the person. Going on long quiet swims with Mitella when she’s feeling overwhelmed, even as they are forced further and further apart by circumstance. Doing random menial tasks that Sorceress find ground her unpleasantly in her body. Giving random snacks to Thaylene when no one else gets how much food a selkie needs to stock for winter. Engaging in debate with [unnamed dragon character] because no one else who can keep up is willing. Appropriate gifts to the centaurs for religious observances ey does not celebrate but knows they do. Physical touch a vigilant eye and a door locked enough to keep even Sorceress out for a few hours for Elise when things get dire in Russia.

[nacricissa]

Worldbuilding Wednesday! What are the stages that take you through visualizing the world of your story?

I'd never really thought about it, so as far as I can tell it usually goes prose first? While I have the gist of events and maybe some plot-relevant characteristics before I start writing things down, the first full visuals come after I've written a scene or snippet or worldbuilding Tumblr post, and I will get vistas as establishing shots, vague inside shots that are alive with the way people move through the place, or dramatic game-trailer-esque pictures of characters in the midst of the action, usually with strong foreground/background contrast.

I will then have my brain run the generative program that it uses to figure out what's going on in the parts of your field of view you aren't focusing on on those snapshots whenever I need to actually describe something.

The only exception to this so far is mapmaking, which fills in the prose slot and has generated some vistas and drone shots.

No question has ever made me feel more like a generative AI but at least I run on bagels and cheese, not 50 percent of the grid power of Wisconsin or whatever it is.

[nacricissa]

I made another vampire....

He likes to chew on bones...

I-....THis is so horrible of me 😮‍💨

Do you by any chance know if he could get some nutrition from the bone marrow?

I'm so sorry 🙁👎

I gotta continue.

When does it disappear?

I am trying to figure out the timeline for its decaying.

Any who this novel might end up darker than I thought I mean I knew it was going to be dark...But damn...The thought organ is thought organing.

I'm so sorry if this is too far 🫠

The straightforward answer is probably. As I'm assuming you know since you asked this question, your blood is produced in the bone marrow. However, most of it pretty immediately goes into your bloodstream, though there will still be some residual proteins which have been made but haven't been shipped yet. The main cell type that actually stay put in your bone marrow for any length of time are the immune cells responsible for keeping a record of invaders that your body has previously faced (B cells). There are also a lot of things in your blood at any given time that are not produced in your bone marrow (hormones, oxygen, medications, alcohol, bloodborne pathogens, etc.) so depending on what is the essential part of your blood a vampire actually needs for nutrition, it may or may not be found in the bone marrow, and may or may not be in any relevant quantity. Would probably still taste good, though, even if it wasn't nutritionally beneficial. And according to Procopio Et al (2018), the timeline is very dependent on environmental conditions (the drier the bones, the better the preservation, this is why we have so much evidence of what the Egyptians were up to 6000 years ago, the place is just really dry so things don't decompose much). They note that the rate of decay is generally most noticeable in the 1-4 month range, with levels reaching their minimum at about 9 months, and their experiment was conducted in England so it was pretty rainy. The methods they used were measuring the proteosome, so really interesting to me I'm glad you sent me in this direction.

[nacricissa]

List 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the askbox for the last 10 people who reblogged something from you! get to know your mutuals and followers. 💖

1 Exams are almost over

2 The air smells like springtime

3 There was a cat in my yard.

4 Playing Magic: The Gathering with my friends

5 Methods of locomotion that require up front effort and then allow me to glide with no effort at reasonably high speeds for a while after I stop putting in effort e.g. biking, skating, rowing

[nacricissa]

asking as a scifi writer myself: how do you avoid the scifi trope of "OHHHHH THE A.I IS EVIL NOW BECAUSE OF A BUG OR PARADOX OHHHHHH"? I don't want my broken a.is to be evil! I want them to be more or Less..just broken, both literally and emotionally

not sure if this is really my question, since I don't think of myself as an authority on sci fi, nor have intended to portray myself as one, but

I do love answering questions. So!

I think the most important distinction is defining a.i. Whether the a.i. in your story is meant to be a conscious intelligence with an experience of reality at least comparable to our own, or whether it's a series of commands being executed with methodical precision with no conscious choice and thus no moral imperative.

In the first case, the way is simply to do a bunch of research/ exploration of disability rights. So depending on how the bug is seated, it could be impairing your a.i.'s cognitive function, in which case learning disabilities would be worth checking into, or it could make it harder for the a.i. to communicate, in which case finding autistic advocates for autistic issues might be a compelling path, or it might make your a.i. struggle with differentiating false returns of their code from reality, in which case you want to find out what kind of problems and solutions people who experience psychosis have found, or maybe your a.i. has an experience similar to people with memory loss or dissociative disorders. The key with all of these is to highlight the ways in which they are the same and also the ways in which they are different. Bad news to say an autistic person is directly equivalent to a robot, but many autistic people do find that robot characters are as close to genuine rep they've seen. In this case you should also check into resources about how to delicately handle coding in media, to avoid putting your foot in your mouth unnecessarily.

In the second case, the key is to highlight the fact that the a.i. has no choice. You could have a paradox leading it to try to execute to mutually incompatible commands and it turns out the harmful one only got executed over the helpful one because of a quirk of how the internal machinery assigned processing power, or because it required fewer checks to a given function. The a.i. could be spending the whole story trying to execute a command to for example send water to aid in a draught, but a broken gear or lever means that all the water spills into waste instead of making it into the aqueduct, to the despair of the people who have made the trek up the aqueduct to see why their evil a.i. overlord has allowed them to go thirsty. A faulty sensor, a bad input, something that means that the rest of the a.i. is functioning properly, is trying to help to accomplish the task for which it was meant but simply can't and it's not the fault of the a.i.

[nacricissa]

what do you think, and I haven't rotated this idea yet. But it's just begun. *Cracks knuckles*

What if the raising the deads price is memory loss on a massive scale?

Ok so that could mean a few things.

One, the dead person has no memory. They must learn everything, from how to breathe to what a car is from scratch. This is pretty "normal" such as it is for necromancy, though few enough stories actually commit to the angst and will capitulate by having the person remember something anyway, like cowards.

The second is that it results in memory loss for the caster, but not the risen dead. This is a really compelling price to pay. You can never have your loved one back, but you could give them their life, and everyone but you. Great tragedy payoff if the caster thinks incorrectly their love is unreciprocated. Also a great comedy thing if you want to play it like that. The senile wizard doesn't recognize anybody, but seems pretty mentally whole otherwise, and then someone from outside the village comes in and doesn't seem to think it's fine when Timmy breaks his back over the fence: of course he'll be fine in the morning, it's only an issue if they stop breathing overnight.

The third option is the one I use to resurrect Elise, actually. You are only dead because people remember you being a thing that can die. So, escaping the afterlife gets a lot easier if no one remembers you. At all. Anywhere. To regain your life you must lose everything that was left of it. Fun stuff.

The last option is random memory loss. At scale. Around the world, people will just forget things ranging from where they left their favourite pen to the fact you shouldn't put water on an oil fire. It's untraceable, really, hard to say what was taken to fuel the spell and what was just normal human forgetfulness. You'll never really be able to quantify the harm you did to bring them back. But you would have let worse happen, and it makes you sick.