Alien planets
Feb. 18th, 2012 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been thinking of making America my alien planet. Not just the USA though, the whole thing. The City on the Sea would be in Los Angeles and the Lost City would be in Vancouver. ... because funny. Also because then I don't have to learn how planets work and invent one, I just pick a weird looking map projection and look stuff up. Though the climate conditions I decided on would complicate that.
I was thinking Vancouver's too far south for all the ice I want to have around, but I looked up the last ice age and the glacial maximum page on wiki and it says all of Canada had ice. It depends on being both cold and wet, so there's places that are more north but not wet enough to get lots of ice. Actual Canada has lots of wet bits. My planet can have cold wet north places.
The ice is supposed to have rolled over the city when it was abandoned and only now be rolling back. Since the planet is terraformed and temperature control should be part of that, the glaciation is an indicator of serious disruption of the high tech level society that had colonised the place. Whatever made them give up the city disrupted their ability to control their world. Their descendants have climbed back up, but they still haven't achieved the same heights. So the Lost City is part of their legends along with the lost knowledge it symbolises. Yet no one has reclaimed it. The melting must be very recent, and actually it simples things up a bit if it's only partial, if there's a couple of branches sticking out from the ice but most of it is still inside. If the snow and frost can settle on the climate control dome somehow then it gets even harder to find. Just one more white bit in the ice wall. Mostly though, people stay away because those old stories? They're kind of like the thing with the snake and the apple. The old knowledge was not, as told, a good thing. Any expedition has to have decided to ignore that.
The City on the Sea was never lost in quite the same way, since it still has humans in it, but they don't have the legendary tech either. Unless they're hiding it real well. Their City is pretty much falling into the sea, and the cliffs have been eroded out from under it. What started as a pretty snowflake pattern is ever closed to a three pronged trident now. The dome that protects the Lost City is nowhere in evidence in the southern version. It still has power, possibly drawn from the sea, and tech that was the marvel of the world, until their neighbours reached the digital age and duplicated most of the effects. But there's nothing overt that would be a miracle to us now. Those kind of things were withdrawn at some point.
The City on the Sea is a civlisation unto itself, developing quite differently from the farms devoted to terraforming the rest of the planet. The City provides so much there's room for people to get decadent. City people are built on a different design. They're taller there - average height of 5' 8" instead of maximum 5' 4". They don't have the compact efficiency the rest of the world designed in. There's been some mixing, but there's a look to a City person. If they wander out into the world, apart from probably getting lost and not knowing how to make breakfast, they'll have to deal with suspicion on first glance. And the feeling is mutual - the lingering perception of the world Outside as being full of luddite peasant savages endears the City to no one.
The main thing that keeps the City separate though is the simple fact of the Sea. Humans do not go down to the Sea. They chose long ago. It's the capertiller's place.
... no, that word doesn't work, does it? You can get a poetry going about the erosion and the falling towers and the people hanging on to dead tech they never really understood and calling themselves the archivists and artists of the world. You can talk about the oddly corporeal spirits they share their lives with. But as soon as you hang a word like capertiller on it, poof, the mood is blown.
Sad. I need a new word then.
Capertillers - whatever they call them locally ... oh, that's a point, capertiller is the Earth human word, they'd have their own name for them. Capertiller is to that as snake is to goa'uld. Then I can keep both words, the word meant to make them sound silly and the evocative one. Right. Capertillers, the spirits of the sea, they own the salt water. The oceans and the body of hot blooded animals suit them equally fine. They're slowed by the cold, easier to avoid up north, but they're so insidious that mostly humans do not want to risk it. Fishing might sound fine, but if you fish up a capertiller you can kiss your old life goodbye. Those who go down to the sea give themselves to the spirits, and they do not always get their own selves back. The symbiotes bond with a nice hot blooded host, and get themselves arms and legs and a whole new perspective on life. On the whole, humans avoid them. But the City has grown up around them, and to them it's just another fact. Like cities on the slopes of volcanos, only seeming insane from the outside. What the City gives by way of shelter and almost free food from the dispensers and all the culture accumulated there is of more value to those who live there than any guarantee of being alone in their own skin.
But they still do not go right down to the water. Not unless they have no other choice.
Unbonded symbiotes are salt water creatures, so you wouldn't have to go far inland to avoid them. Even rivers would be safe, not being enough like blood. But symbiotes can bond with animals, or even birds, and then they can turn up anywhere. Bonded humans might be rare outside the city... but then again, how would you know? They certainly don't tend to announce themselves often. Those who do are usually those who have the most trouble passing, the ones who haven't been human before. Zizel is one of those. She hasn't come straight from the squirrel she named herself for. From that to a wolf maybe, something that ate her. That's the problem once symbiotes are in your food chain, you don't know where they've climbed on now. And from a wolf to a human. You're left wondering why and how and whose idea it was. Everyone who sees her is left wondering, and left to wonder if it's their turn next.
Are there witch hunts? This is humans we're talking about, of course there are, sometimes. But they are very difficult to kill. And if you slice them in half you have two individuals now looking for a host. Even quite small sections can control quite small creatures, so you'd better get all your pets out of the way before you try anything short of mashing and burning. Cremation would be surest. But you waste so many good nutrients that way, there's sure to be a lot of burials that never knew.
If capertillers especially wanted to, they could take over the world. Many humans are convinced they're secretly trying. Many capertillers think they're nuts, because hello, parasite here, have a world, build it up like a nice strong body, they'll hang out and use your civilisation for their own purposes, thanks.
... which might look quite a lot like taking over the world, at least on a local scale, from the wrong angles.
Zizel at least is unaware of any plots. Nobody told the sea about any such thing yet. Not in the century she climbed out of, anyway.
Capertillers are the main reason the City and the archives stay running, and that the City language stays the same. Those who lived there all along just keep doing what they do, and talking the same ways. They may have switched hosts or split into more individuals since the fall of the Terraformers, but they do not forget.
... in terms of adventure seeds and campaign tone, the City would be a whole different world than the rest of the planet. Immortals with their own agenda swapping hosts, sometimes taking holidays as other species, bringing alien thought patterns back to familiar faces. Politics working with and around these persistent identities.
... How does identity even work if you can split in two and keep being a person? It's like surviving, but sort of reshuffled, since some bits would go to each of the new people. Maybe the more commonly used memories are likely to be in all the parts so everyone keeps them, but some specialised bits that you don't think of so often are localised too, so they can get split up. One that knows all the story can become two who remember parts. They'd react differently then. Also when they're plugged in to new brains they react differently anyway, since they have new chemistry and new circuits to do the thinking with. More like a Trill symbiote like Dax, a new blend every time, than like a goa'uld, just over-riding the host. Yet from the hosts point of view, there is no knowing how much of the host will survive. Sure, the new resident can remember all the same things, but it may or may not care about them. It might never let go enough to let you think your own thoughts. Or it might just lurk in the back dreaming, and let you get on with a life it wouldn't have thought of living. You never know, even when you know what they were like in their last host. Always a gamble. So, identity: Is it like a tok'ra with their host, two persons in one body, alternating? It can be, but it can also be like a goa'uld, with the symbiote responsible for all actions. Since it is possible to remove the symbiote - it's no fun if you can't - that would be very important, trying to distinguish who did what while inhabited! But even if the symbiote is put in a new body, it is still not the same person it was when it did or allowed those actions in the previous host. Ezri is not Jadzia, even while both are Dax. Carrying a serial killer in your memory doesn't make you one.
... that's like the maximum possible stories, but possibly too broad? It's like there's no limits on it. All the possible answers about what makes an identity are right there.
I mean, if each blending is a unique person, made up of two unique persons, each blended is a trinity, not a duality. And the trinity is unique even if each part of the duality persists. Taking a symbiote out of a host would be destroying a unique personality, a kind of murder. Yet both life forms could survive it. They could be rejoined later. So it's, what, murder on hold? Potential murder? But if the symbiote joins with a new host, or the host joins with another symbiote, then they will be changed by that experience. If they're swapped back together again later, are they the original trinity, or yet another distinct person?
You could spend all the time making stories trying to answer just that.
And would it say much about human experience?
Well what a symbiote basically is is memory. They're the hard drive. They're the experience of thousands of years, uniquely emphasised and edited. Split any symbiote in two and they're the same events remembered two differently patchy ways, like two witnesses to the same history. So just with that you can explore how remembering and forgetting shapes actions and attitudes.
Then when they join with a human, there's a contest of wills, but only if both parts want to fight. If either wants to surrender then the other is dominant. So why would one surrender? Perhaps trust, if nothing bad has come of it thus far. Perhaps despair, if all the worst things have already happened, so you might as well let someone else have control of your resources. I was thinking, someone else have the body, but a symbiote could feel the same despair because it has memories and emotions, it could decide to let the host have control if it believes it didn't do well with all that knowledge before. Perhaps curiousity, if you just want to see your world through entirely new perceptions. There's reasons to surrender. And also reasons to fight, if you need that body, or that knowledge, or the healing a symbiote can bring, or the capacity for intelligent thought that a symbiote simply doesn't have without a host. Symbiotes are very passive and instinctive in their sea spirit form. They'll head towards the electric signals of other life forms, sometimes, or away from them, but for fish sorts of reasons, not smart brain reasons. Many, having experienced intelligence, are quite desperate or determined to keep hold of it. Others, having experienced intelligence, would really rather be fish.
All the possibilities. Worlds of story. I'm just going to have the one character? Hmmm. Only one to start, maybe.
So, the symbiote is memory, forgetting, experience. But the host is a whole unique biochemistry and set of relationships they grew up in. So if you have almost the same experience, but in two different hosts, then you'll get them reacting different ways. It explores human experience in that two people live through the same thing but react differently.
The goa'uld thing where there's an evil snake who just takes control is... well, kind of a total waste. Especially if you don't explore why someone would feel the need to do that. If they just do conquest because they're eeeevil that's... well, that's going to fit into 45 minutes of television, to be fair, but still.
So, the City on the Sea, it's full of all these people who become other people, people who are masks for a character that can move between bodies but is expressed differently by each of them. That's why it's funny that it's Los Angeles. Because, city of actors. Each blending is like the different interpretations an actor will bring to a character, even when given the same words.
... I just spent a lot of words wondering about alien biology and psychology just to end up with concluding 'it's like how Hamlet is never the same twice'. Oh well.
It kind of does explain why they haven't taken over the world yet. Actors doing politics? (Reagan joke goes here. But I'm British and don't know any Reagan jokes.)(Also Governator jokes.) Also... okay, there's probably no shortage of actor-politics, I was just thinking they'd be being artistic and not doing conquering. Which fits the City on the Sea pretty well. But since one of the things the capertillers like about a human brain is the ability to plot and scheme, even as a funny, this does not work very well.
Right then.
America. On an alien planet. In a weird map projection.
That means I can use Google maps to plan where the biotechnicians' expedition has been wandering, in the year or two they've spent getting up to the Lost City.
So he's a horse designer demonstrating the long distance endurance of your product, and also a guy who just graduated university and sees a lifetime of the family horse trading business ahead of him. Where would he come from and where would he go, in this not-America?
But then if I start using actual places as inspiration and bizarro them, I should stick closer to home. I can get a lot of mileage out of details I understand and know well. I can only bork up Foreign Parts.
So I could use Britain as the map, but I'd have to make it really really bigger before you could really stick a lost city at one end and a lot of different civilisations at the other. I mean, just multiplying everything by ten or whatever could work, but I'd only have to still figure out the climate and all myself. ... but having specified Ice Age, I'd have to do that to America anyway.
Eh, I'll end up ignoring all this all anyway, and just making like a street or a village at a time when people look at them.
I just keep thinking of new and interesting ways to time waste.
The excuse that I can write short stories for The Short Story unit set in this world only holds up if I then actually do so.
And, also, do all the other reading for other classes too.
I was thinking Vancouver's too far south for all the ice I want to have around, but I looked up the last ice age and the glacial maximum page on wiki and it says all of Canada had ice. It depends on being both cold and wet, so there's places that are more north but not wet enough to get lots of ice. Actual Canada has lots of wet bits. My planet can have cold wet north places.
The ice is supposed to have rolled over the city when it was abandoned and only now be rolling back. Since the planet is terraformed and temperature control should be part of that, the glaciation is an indicator of serious disruption of the high tech level society that had colonised the place. Whatever made them give up the city disrupted their ability to control their world. Their descendants have climbed back up, but they still haven't achieved the same heights. So the Lost City is part of their legends along with the lost knowledge it symbolises. Yet no one has reclaimed it. The melting must be very recent, and actually it simples things up a bit if it's only partial, if there's a couple of branches sticking out from the ice but most of it is still inside. If the snow and frost can settle on the climate control dome somehow then it gets even harder to find. Just one more white bit in the ice wall. Mostly though, people stay away because those old stories? They're kind of like the thing with the snake and the apple. The old knowledge was not, as told, a good thing. Any expedition has to have decided to ignore that.
The City on the Sea was never lost in quite the same way, since it still has humans in it, but they don't have the legendary tech either. Unless they're hiding it real well. Their City is pretty much falling into the sea, and the cliffs have been eroded out from under it. What started as a pretty snowflake pattern is ever closed to a three pronged trident now. The dome that protects the Lost City is nowhere in evidence in the southern version. It still has power, possibly drawn from the sea, and tech that was the marvel of the world, until their neighbours reached the digital age and duplicated most of the effects. But there's nothing overt that would be a miracle to us now. Those kind of things were withdrawn at some point.
The City on the Sea is a civlisation unto itself, developing quite differently from the farms devoted to terraforming the rest of the planet. The City provides so much there's room for people to get decadent. City people are built on a different design. They're taller there - average height of 5' 8" instead of maximum 5' 4". They don't have the compact efficiency the rest of the world designed in. There's been some mixing, but there's a look to a City person. If they wander out into the world, apart from probably getting lost and not knowing how to make breakfast, they'll have to deal with suspicion on first glance. And the feeling is mutual - the lingering perception of the world Outside as being full of luddite peasant savages endears the City to no one.
The main thing that keeps the City separate though is the simple fact of the Sea. Humans do not go down to the Sea. They chose long ago. It's the capertiller's place.
... no, that word doesn't work, does it? You can get a poetry going about the erosion and the falling towers and the people hanging on to dead tech they never really understood and calling themselves the archivists and artists of the world. You can talk about the oddly corporeal spirits they share their lives with. But as soon as you hang a word like capertiller on it, poof, the mood is blown.
Sad. I need a new word then.
Capertillers - whatever they call them locally ... oh, that's a point, capertiller is the Earth human word, they'd have their own name for them. Capertiller is to that as snake is to goa'uld. Then I can keep both words, the word meant to make them sound silly and the evocative one. Right. Capertillers, the spirits of the sea, they own the salt water. The oceans and the body of hot blooded animals suit them equally fine. They're slowed by the cold, easier to avoid up north, but they're so insidious that mostly humans do not want to risk it. Fishing might sound fine, but if you fish up a capertiller you can kiss your old life goodbye. Those who go down to the sea give themselves to the spirits, and they do not always get their own selves back. The symbiotes bond with a nice hot blooded host, and get themselves arms and legs and a whole new perspective on life. On the whole, humans avoid them. But the City has grown up around them, and to them it's just another fact. Like cities on the slopes of volcanos, only seeming insane from the outside. What the City gives by way of shelter and almost free food from the dispensers and all the culture accumulated there is of more value to those who live there than any guarantee of being alone in their own skin.
But they still do not go right down to the water. Not unless they have no other choice.
Unbonded symbiotes are salt water creatures, so you wouldn't have to go far inland to avoid them. Even rivers would be safe, not being enough like blood. But symbiotes can bond with animals, or even birds, and then they can turn up anywhere. Bonded humans might be rare outside the city... but then again, how would you know? They certainly don't tend to announce themselves often. Those who do are usually those who have the most trouble passing, the ones who haven't been human before. Zizel is one of those. She hasn't come straight from the squirrel she named herself for. From that to a wolf maybe, something that ate her. That's the problem once symbiotes are in your food chain, you don't know where they've climbed on now. And from a wolf to a human. You're left wondering why and how and whose idea it was. Everyone who sees her is left wondering, and left to wonder if it's their turn next.
Are there witch hunts? This is humans we're talking about, of course there are, sometimes. But they are very difficult to kill. And if you slice them in half you have two individuals now looking for a host. Even quite small sections can control quite small creatures, so you'd better get all your pets out of the way before you try anything short of mashing and burning. Cremation would be surest. But you waste so many good nutrients that way, there's sure to be a lot of burials that never knew.
If capertillers especially wanted to, they could take over the world. Many humans are convinced they're secretly trying. Many capertillers think they're nuts, because hello, parasite here, have a world, build it up like a nice strong body, they'll hang out and use your civilisation for their own purposes, thanks.
... which might look quite a lot like taking over the world, at least on a local scale, from the wrong angles.
Zizel at least is unaware of any plots. Nobody told the sea about any such thing yet. Not in the century she climbed out of, anyway.
Capertillers are the main reason the City and the archives stay running, and that the City language stays the same. Those who lived there all along just keep doing what they do, and talking the same ways. They may have switched hosts or split into more individuals since the fall of the Terraformers, but they do not forget.
... in terms of adventure seeds and campaign tone, the City would be a whole different world than the rest of the planet. Immortals with their own agenda swapping hosts, sometimes taking holidays as other species, bringing alien thought patterns back to familiar faces. Politics working with and around these persistent identities.
... How does identity even work if you can split in two and keep being a person? It's like surviving, but sort of reshuffled, since some bits would go to each of the new people. Maybe the more commonly used memories are likely to be in all the parts so everyone keeps them, but some specialised bits that you don't think of so often are localised too, so they can get split up. One that knows all the story can become two who remember parts. They'd react differently then. Also when they're plugged in to new brains they react differently anyway, since they have new chemistry and new circuits to do the thinking with. More like a Trill symbiote like Dax, a new blend every time, than like a goa'uld, just over-riding the host. Yet from the hosts point of view, there is no knowing how much of the host will survive. Sure, the new resident can remember all the same things, but it may or may not care about them. It might never let go enough to let you think your own thoughts. Or it might just lurk in the back dreaming, and let you get on with a life it wouldn't have thought of living. You never know, even when you know what they were like in their last host. Always a gamble. So, identity: Is it like a tok'ra with their host, two persons in one body, alternating? It can be, but it can also be like a goa'uld, with the symbiote responsible for all actions. Since it is possible to remove the symbiote - it's no fun if you can't - that would be very important, trying to distinguish who did what while inhabited! But even if the symbiote is put in a new body, it is still not the same person it was when it did or allowed those actions in the previous host. Ezri is not Jadzia, even while both are Dax. Carrying a serial killer in your memory doesn't make you one.
... that's like the maximum possible stories, but possibly too broad? It's like there's no limits on it. All the possible answers about what makes an identity are right there.
I mean, if each blending is a unique person, made up of two unique persons, each blended is a trinity, not a duality. And the trinity is unique even if each part of the duality persists. Taking a symbiote out of a host would be destroying a unique personality, a kind of murder. Yet both life forms could survive it. They could be rejoined later. So it's, what, murder on hold? Potential murder? But if the symbiote joins with a new host, or the host joins with another symbiote, then they will be changed by that experience. If they're swapped back together again later, are they the original trinity, or yet another distinct person?
You could spend all the time making stories trying to answer just that.
And would it say much about human experience?
Well what a symbiote basically is is memory. They're the hard drive. They're the experience of thousands of years, uniquely emphasised and edited. Split any symbiote in two and they're the same events remembered two differently patchy ways, like two witnesses to the same history. So just with that you can explore how remembering and forgetting shapes actions and attitudes.
Then when they join with a human, there's a contest of wills, but only if both parts want to fight. If either wants to surrender then the other is dominant. So why would one surrender? Perhaps trust, if nothing bad has come of it thus far. Perhaps despair, if all the worst things have already happened, so you might as well let someone else have control of your resources. I was thinking, someone else have the body, but a symbiote could feel the same despair because it has memories and emotions, it could decide to let the host have control if it believes it didn't do well with all that knowledge before. Perhaps curiousity, if you just want to see your world through entirely new perceptions. There's reasons to surrender. And also reasons to fight, if you need that body, or that knowledge, or the healing a symbiote can bring, or the capacity for intelligent thought that a symbiote simply doesn't have without a host. Symbiotes are very passive and instinctive in their sea spirit form. They'll head towards the electric signals of other life forms, sometimes, or away from them, but for fish sorts of reasons, not smart brain reasons. Many, having experienced intelligence, are quite desperate or determined to keep hold of it. Others, having experienced intelligence, would really rather be fish.
All the possibilities. Worlds of story. I'm just going to have the one character? Hmmm. Only one to start, maybe.
So, the symbiote is memory, forgetting, experience. But the host is a whole unique biochemistry and set of relationships they grew up in. So if you have almost the same experience, but in two different hosts, then you'll get them reacting different ways. It explores human experience in that two people live through the same thing but react differently.
The goa'uld thing where there's an evil snake who just takes control is... well, kind of a total waste. Especially if you don't explore why someone would feel the need to do that. If they just do conquest because they're eeeevil that's... well, that's going to fit into 45 minutes of television, to be fair, but still.
So, the City on the Sea, it's full of all these people who become other people, people who are masks for a character that can move between bodies but is expressed differently by each of them. That's why it's funny that it's Los Angeles. Because, city of actors. Each blending is like the different interpretations an actor will bring to a character, even when given the same words.
... I just spent a lot of words wondering about alien biology and psychology just to end up with concluding 'it's like how Hamlet is never the same twice'. Oh well.
It kind of does explain why they haven't taken over the world yet. Actors doing politics? (Reagan joke goes here. But I'm British and don't know any Reagan jokes.)(Also Governator jokes.) Also... okay, there's probably no shortage of actor-politics, I was just thinking they'd be being artistic and not doing conquering. Which fits the City on the Sea pretty well. But since one of the things the capertillers like about a human brain is the ability to plot and scheme, even as a funny, this does not work very well.
Right then.
America. On an alien planet. In a weird map projection.
That means I can use Google maps to plan where the biotechnicians' expedition has been wandering, in the year or two they've spent getting up to the Lost City.
So he's a horse designer demonstrating the long distance endurance of your product, and also a guy who just graduated university and sees a lifetime of the family horse trading business ahead of him. Where would he come from and where would he go, in this not-America?
But then if I start using actual places as inspiration and bizarro them, I should stick closer to home. I can get a lot of mileage out of details I understand and know well. I can only bork up Foreign Parts.
So I could use Britain as the map, but I'd have to make it really really bigger before you could really stick a lost city at one end and a lot of different civilisations at the other. I mean, just multiplying everything by ten or whatever could work, but I'd only have to still figure out the climate and all myself. ... but having specified Ice Age, I'd have to do that to America anyway.
Eh, I'll end up ignoring all this all anyway, and just making like a street or a village at a time when people look at them.
I just keep thinking of new and interesting ways to time waste.
The excuse that I can write short stories for The Short Story unit set in this world only holds up if I then actually do so.
And, also, do all the other reading for other classes too.