How rocks work
Jan. 27th, 2012 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI've been poking this silly story idea, and I've ended up with half a dozen characters, a story that can be told with 8 speaking parts and some redshirts, and a sketch of an alien world built on bioscience. They have babelfish. They look like jellyfish and plug in to your brain through your ear but they let you learn new languages so they'll be called babelfish. I haven't decided yet if they make pills of language or just rewire your brain for you. Either is creepy. ANYway, biotech, aliens in masks and cloaks, harsh environment that looks remarkably like bits of Britain with a glacier painted in the background, and an alien city that on the whole is quite a lot likely to look like the UEA. Or similar big concrete whatsit. We have ziggurats. And lots of right angles. You can see how practical aliens might end up with lots of right angles. I'm not convinced ziggurats are practical but they are shiny so that works out. I have poked the British Army website until I have words for what the ex military people all used to do. I have decided what the theologian and astrophysicist do and why they want to go along in the first place. I have most things sorted.
What I do not have is a vague clue how the stone circles will work. And on the one hand I know they work by me saying lalala they work okay now lets have an adventure. So it isn't science I'm needing. But on the other, I need to decide some things about how the characters have to act to get them to work, and some things about what Rhodri studies exactly that leads to him getting them to work. So what I have so far is a big circle of rocks that can be made to swap everything inside the circle with another circle on a whole different planet. But I don't know where the on switch is. Or how Rhodri discovers it.
On Stargate they have lots of moving parts, a big dial to dig up from a desert, and a clever code to figure out. So they have an archaeologist linguist egyptologist. He's also handy on adventures because he can peer at the walls and tell them exactly how much trouble they're in this time, or translate a word wrong and make the trouble in the first place. But I want the linguist to be one of the people on the other planet, with a jelly-babel-fish, and I don't want that planet to be the ones to figure out how to come here. Not at first, or instead of Explorers the story is Base Under Seige, being a farm in the middle of nowhere and the aliens turn up. Which actually isn't a bad story, but it's not what the series is meant to be about, so I'd want to get them off world quickly in the first episode. Maybe later they come home and discover it's harder to close the door than they think. Or maybe that's why they leave so quickly in the first place, they're going visiting because the others have demonstrated the ability to come here. Either way, if I don't want the linguist to figure it out, then it isn't a clever bit of writing or something to do with symbols. Also, if I want to imply that all the old stone circles are part of the transport network, it can't have many sorts of symbols, on account of someone would have noticed by now. There are cup and ring marks, dots with more dots or sometimes big circles around them. Maybe they're buttons.
Or maybe they would be buttons if you put the right sorts of crystal in them. On Stargate the DHDs are crystal powered, so you can have people poking around in them desperately swapping crystals against the clock. And then they're a scavenger hunt, because if someone nicks a crystal you have to go get it again. And that explains why nobody can use the circles except Rhodri, because they lost the crystal buttons.
But that would mean the skill he has that makes them work again is basically collecting shiny things and poking them into weird places. Which... could certainly get him into trouble offworld, but isn't in itself impressive.
I was thinking of the bits in hidden object games that are so annoying people could reasonably be expected to give up for a few thousand years. Because hunt the shiny crystal is a common thread in hidden object games. I don't like the bits where you have to play a tune with clicking the right buttons. You think it'll be simple, just copy the shiny patterns, but noooo, far too many things to click. So if you have to retrieve the right shiny things and then push them in the right order and nobody showed you the order, obviously it will take ages to figure out. But then what Rhodri does is (a) save up shiny things (b) poke them in holes and (c) push them a lot until something happens. He is at this point a bit more of a nutter than I wanted. Especially since real life doesn't usually light up when you get it right, unlike hidden object games. Though if they did out the back of his farm, that might explain why he got obsessed with the weird rocks. Because they did weird things.
See this is the problem, it's all very well once you have a Stargate, but who on Earth spends any significant time fiddling with it in the first place? On government money no less? It doesn't do anything! For many decades! In any reasonable universe Earth gives up and only gets a surprise when the goa'uld arrive, still clueless how to respond. Then they invade and we all die. The End.
... but the Stargate universe includes the quantum mirror so they can go visit boring places like that and come back to the wildly unlikely successful one. That's why all those longshot last chances work. In all the universes we're not watching the team just die horribly and Earth loses. Physics fact. But since everything that can happen does happen somewhere, Daniel Jackson somehow survives in this one universe.
... none of which is very helpful to inventing a new place.
What skills do I need once we're out adventuring? Well if using the circle requires skill then they could take Rhodri to lots of places so he can make the lift work. But making the lift work is not very exciting in between times. Also, if they work out a way to communicate through the stone circles, which I was planning for them to do, they could keep the lift button dude at home and call when they wanted the lift. It's not a role that puts him at the heart of the story very often.
When poking around on alien planets, you really need the guy that can make the map. Because meeting people is all very well, but if you want to meet them twice you need to know where to go. And you can't ask your clever tech because it all depends on clever signals that aren't set up yet.
Rhodri's hobby is stone circles and exploring ancient megaliths and poking rocks.
Rhodri's job is surveying. Not the seeing if houses fall down sort. The sort where he might end up half way up a mountain with a tripod and a yellow coat.
Rhodri's skill is finding things. So the thing he needs to do to stone circles is mostly find them.
Most stone circles aren't in fact circles any more.
Someone down the pub suggested that a good way around the why not for thousands of years problem was to have one or more of the stones have been dragged off centuries ago, and then someone identifies it, probably by chemical composition or other geology markers, and then there's fuss trying to reunite it with the other stones. That works. Except in this case they weren't just dragged off for building material, if people knew what the circles did and wanted it to stop they could just drag a lump away and kill the circle.
So: Rhodri has a stone circle in his back garden. He also has one stone as the cornerstone of his farm house. He likes rocks so he figures this out at a young age, and then when he inherits the place he decides he actually would rather risk knocking the house down than keep leaving that stone in the wrong place. And then he has much closer to a whole circle, and he would be calculating the angles and figuring out what else he needs to find, and then he'd spend years of his life taking holidays to go look at rocks and see if they match. Which is still a bit obsessive, but you find people with websites full of pictures of rocks, it's a hobby. So eventually he gets all the rocks together and he gets to digging things up and shoving things around to make them all be in exactly the right place. And his girlfriend and her boyfriend are all :eyeroll: about it, but what can you do, some guys fix up old cars or old houses, he fixes up old megaliths. Fair enough. And then, one day, it starts working.
So, I still need to know the on switch. His skill is finding things and measuring them and mapping them. Maybe he does find the shiny that goes in the button places. Maybe it has been handed down the family, a funny not very pretty lump they're not supposed to lose. Maybe it doesn't matter which crystal, just which type of crystal.
I don't know though. Do I want buttons that can be lost? Then someone gets them confiscated and they have to poke around a city looking for them without getting arrested. It's a story generator. It just seems a bit of a cheap one.
Is it a thing, to be owned, or a skill, to be learned and taught? Or both?
I had a thought about sound, like he could need a tuning fork and to press buttons until everything is in harmony. Music of the spheres! And then if you don't have a tuning fork you'd need to hold a note singing. Which doesn't work easily but you can see people having a circle song so they don't give away their home frequency. Also, if it's a song, you can imagine how he'd notice the odd resonance in the stones. Because he sings while he works.
So then you have a character who likes rocks, surveys, maps, figuring out the exact place for everything, and singing while he works.
He's kind of insufferable now.
... I'm not an exact place kind of person.
I'd like making it musical though, more than just visual. Glowing is nice, but I listen to so many audios now I turn ideas around so they'd work that way sort of by habit.
There's lots of stuff around about the acoustic properties of megaliths.
... including a page about acoustic levitation. *blinks*
... the world is a weird, weird place.
If the circles glow or make a noise that makes it rather difficult to sneak in, or out.
Handy.
I don't know about the shiny buttons idea.
It would still be rather weird to poke crystals into cup holes.
The music idea comes with an artefact that can be stolen - the tuning form - and a way around it if you're skilled enough - singing. And then you push the buttons until they feel right, like making a harmony in the stone.
... In these stones horizons sing...
... okay, I guess I have my on switch...
So after all that wandering:
Rhodri retrieves the rocks from all over the country, to finish his stone circle.
The cup marks are secretly buttons.
If you make the right note they react, and you have to play the stone like you're making a tune on it.
It's silly, but then so is funny little written symbols. Instead of saying a password, these stones want you to play a tune. It's still pressing buttons until you've got the pin number right.
That means they have to make a noise to get the stone circle to work, it takes some time to get right, especially under pressure, and it's harder to just sneak in and out. I like that, plenty of tension to be had out of difficult doors.
... this story does not get any more sensible.
What I do not have is a vague clue how the stone circles will work. And on the one hand I know they work by me saying lalala they work okay now lets have an adventure. So it isn't science I'm needing. But on the other, I need to decide some things about how the characters have to act to get them to work, and some things about what Rhodri studies exactly that leads to him getting them to work. So what I have so far is a big circle of rocks that can be made to swap everything inside the circle with another circle on a whole different planet. But I don't know where the on switch is. Or how Rhodri discovers it.
On Stargate they have lots of moving parts, a big dial to dig up from a desert, and a clever code to figure out. So they have an archaeologist linguist egyptologist. He's also handy on adventures because he can peer at the walls and tell them exactly how much trouble they're in this time, or translate a word wrong and make the trouble in the first place. But I want the linguist to be one of the people on the other planet, with a jelly-babel-fish, and I don't want that planet to be the ones to figure out how to come here. Not at first, or instead of Explorers the story is Base Under Seige, being a farm in the middle of nowhere and the aliens turn up. Which actually isn't a bad story, but it's not what the series is meant to be about, so I'd want to get them off world quickly in the first episode. Maybe later they come home and discover it's harder to close the door than they think. Or maybe that's why they leave so quickly in the first place, they're going visiting because the others have demonstrated the ability to come here. Either way, if I don't want the linguist to figure it out, then it isn't a clever bit of writing or something to do with symbols. Also, if I want to imply that all the old stone circles are part of the transport network, it can't have many sorts of symbols, on account of someone would have noticed by now. There are cup and ring marks, dots with more dots or sometimes big circles around them. Maybe they're buttons.
Or maybe they would be buttons if you put the right sorts of crystal in them. On Stargate the DHDs are crystal powered, so you can have people poking around in them desperately swapping crystals against the clock. And then they're a scavenger hunt, because if someone nicks a crystal you have to go get it again. And that explains why nobody can use the circles except Rhodri, because they lost the crystal buttons.
But that would mean the skill he has that makes them work again is basically collecting shiny things and poking them into weird places. Which... could certainly get him into trouble offworld, but isn't in itself impressive.
I was thinking of the bits in hidden object games that are so annoying people could reasonably be expected to give up for a few thousand years. Because hunt the shiny crystal is a common thread in hidden object games. I don't like the bits where you have to play a tune with clicking the right buttons. You think it'll be simple, just copy the shiny patterns, but noooo, far too many things to click. So if you have to retrieve the right shiny things and then push them in the right order and nobody showed you the order, obviously it will take ages to figure out. But then what Rhodri does is (a) save up shiny things (b) poke them in holes and (c) push them a lot until something happens. He is at this point a bit more of a nutter than I wanted. Especially since real life doesn't usually light up when you get it right, unlike hidden object games. Though if they did out the back of his farm, that might explain why he got obsessed with the weird rocks. Because they did weird things.
See this is the problem, it's all very well once you have a Stargate, but who on Earth spends any significant time fiddling with it in the first place? On government money no less? It doesn't do anything! For many decades! In any reasonable universe Earth gives up and only gets a surprise when the goa'uld arrive, still clueless how to respond. Then they invade and we all die. The End.
... but the Stargate universe includes the quantum mirror so they can go visit boring places like that and come back to the wildly unlikely successful one. That's why all those longshot last chances work. In all the universes we're not watching the team just die horribly and Earth loses. Physics fact. But since everything that can happen does happen somewhere, Daniel Jackson somehow survives in this one universe.
... none of which is very helpful to inventing a new place.
What skills do I need once we're out adventuring? Well if using the circle requires skill then they could take Rhodri to lots of places so he can make the lift work. But making the lift work is not very exciting in between times. Also, if they work out a way to communicate through the stone circles, which I was planning for them to do, they could keep the lift button dude at home and call when they wanted the lift. It's not a role that puts him at the heart of the story very often.
When poking around on alien planets, you really need the guy that can make the map. Because meeting people is all very well, but if you want to meet them twice you need to know where to go. And you can't ask your clever tech because it all depends on clever signals that aren't set up yet.
Rhodri's hobby is stone circles and exploring ancient megaliths and poking rocks.
Rhodri's job is surveying. Not the seeing if houses fall down sort. The sort where he might end up half way up a mountain with a tripod and a yellow coat.
Rhodri's skill is finding things. So the thing he needs to do to stone circles is mostly find them.
Most stone circles aren't in fact circles any more.
Someone down the pub suggested that a good way around the why not for thousands of years problem was to have one or more of the stones have been dragged off centuries ago, and then someone identifies it, probably by chemical composition or other geology markers, and then there's fuss trying to reunite it with the other stones. That works. Except in this case they weren't just dragged off for building material, if people knew what the circles did and wanted it to stop they could just drag a lump away and kill the circle.
So: Rhodri has a stone circle in his back garden. He also has one stone as the cornerstone of his farm house. He likes rocks so he figures this out at a young age, and then when he inherits the place he decides he actually would rather risk knocking the house down than keep leaving that stone in the wrong place. And then he has much closer to a whole circle, and he would be calculating the angles and figuring out what else he needs to find, and then he'd spend years of his life taking holidays to go look at rocks and see if they match. Which is still a bit obsessive, but you find people with websites full of pictures of rocks, it's a hobby. So eventually he gets all the rocks together and he gets to digging things up and shoving things around to make them all be in exactly the right place. And his girlfriend and her boyfriend are all :eyeroll: about it, but what can you do, some guys fix up old cars or old houses, he fixes up old megaliths. Fair enough. And then, one day, it starts working.
So, I still need to know the on switch. His skill is finding things and measuring them and mapping them. Maybe he does find the shiny that goes in the button places. Maybe it has been handed down the family, a funny not very pretty lump they're not supposed to lose. Maybe it doesn't matter which crystal, just which type of crystal.
I don't know though. Do I want buttons that can be lost? Then someone gets them confiscated and they have to poke around a city looking for them without getting arrested. It's a story generator. It just seems a bit of a cheap one.
Is it a thing, to be owned, or a skill, to be learned and taught? Or both?
I had a thought about sound, like he could need a tuning fork and to press buttons until everything is in harmony. Music of the spheres! And then if you don't have a tuning fork you'd need to hold a note singing. Which doesn't work easily but you can see people having a circle song so they don't give away their home frequency. Also, if it's a song, you can imagine how he'd notice the odd resonance in the stones. Because he sings while he works.
So then you have a character who likes rocks, surveys, maps, figuring out the exact place for everything, and singing while he works.
He's kind of insufferable now.
... I'm not an exact place kind of person.
I'd like making it musical though, more than just visual. Glowing is nice, but I listen to so many audios now I turn ideas around so they'd work that way sort of by habit.
There's lots of stuff around about the acoustic properties of megaliths.
... including a page about acoustic levitation. *blinks*
... the world is a weird, weird place.
If the circles glow or make a noise that makes it rather difficult to sneak in, or out.
Handy.
I don't know about the shiny buttons idea.
It would still be rather weird to poke crystals into cup holes.
The music idea comes with an artefact that can be stolen - the tuning form - and a way around it if you're skilled enough - singing. And then you push the buttons until they feel right, like making a harmony in the stone.
... In these stones horizons sing...
... okay, I guess I have my on switch...
So after all that wandering:
Rhodri retrieves the rocks from all over the country, to finish his stone circle.
The cup marks are secretly buttons.
If you make the right note they react, and you have to play the stone like you're making a tune on it.
It's silly, but then so is funny little written symbols. Instead of saying a password, these stones want you to play a tune. It's still pressing buttons until you've got the pin number right.
That means they have to make a noise to get the stone circle to work, it takes some time to get right, especially under pressure, and it's harder to just sneak in and out. I like that, plenty of tension to be had out of difficult doors.
... this story does not get any more sensible.