Sides and conflicts
Mar. 2nd, 2012 07:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI keep on inventing more sides for this 'verse. Like, it's not just people from Earth vs people from the biotech world. There's six different biotech people in the biotech adventure party and they all have a different reason for being there.
I haven't got very deep into those reasons yet, but they involve two distinct attitudes to dead tech, plus a lot of specialist tech that takes some explaining for why they're carting it around. Like the guy that wears a living ghillie suit and grows grenades. What kind of guy feels the need to wear all that? And what's it like back home, if everyone can grow their own? The bug lady is interesting, because bugs for communication and bugs for surveillance are the same sneaky little bugs. The one with the symbiote has a whole civilisation sketched in, the way the City on the Sea developed and all the ways they live with their symbiotes, but her specific reason for going to the City that was Lost will be interesting. As will the reaction of that city to her. Language lady, horse guy, and dead tech lady I know the reasons for - collect the stories, prove the horses can cross the distance while collecting the cryptozoology, find more dead tech. But what civilisations do they come from? Is horse guy from some nomadic dudes, or is he just the used car salesman of his people? Is dead tech lady from a rebel people or just a rebel within her people? I get to figure it all out. It's fun.
But then there's the City itself. As far as the City is concerned the Earth people and the biotech people are just as foreign. They're all ten thousand years distant. So that's three sides with multiple factions each.
And then within the City there are the Lost, each and all beings who were rejected by those who evacuated and tried to shut the city behind them. Up to 100 different monsters.
Those are going to be fun to invent.
Every time I invent something I define something about those who built them and those who rejected them. Every single one of them seemed like a good idea to some biotechnician somewhere, and every last one seemed like a really bad idea right around the same time the planetary scale climate control was breaking down and the city was lost to the ice. Which was about the same time the interplanetary gates stopped being used.
So they're kind of a pot of a hundred ways to collapse a civilisation.
Things they could fight about, things they could be defeated by.
Though since the planet is full of basic humans now, not things that won that particular planet.
The Giant Capertiller that hooks all the minds together makes the City computer. It's the mind of the City, basically. But the City has some autonomous responses the Capertiller can't control.
Arty, the first monster out, I've been thinking is a little bit dragon, a little bit hypnotic. Persuasive. The more you hang around with him, the more he seems to have really good ideas. Especially if you're in a small room with little air circulation. Pheromonal control. Stargate only went there a couple of times and had a magic reset button for it, but really, that's seriously powerful stuff. Stuff you breathe that makes you think different? Powerful. Add that this guy is the smartest guy in the Matrix, and you have a planet killer bad guy.
A planet killer who cannot at first get out of the City.
Then there's the wolf lady. Or, not wolf, because who starts with raw wolf when you've had so many generations to tinker with the genome for useful traits? Dog lady. Yes, the b word becomes obvious. She's only slightly less smart than Arty. I was thinking Ylva, for ulfr (which should have accents on it somewhere), for wolf. But now I'm thinking of starting with a Rhodesian Ridgeback. Loyal, loving, devoted, intelligent, independent, stubborn, protective. Designed to hunt lions. Fearless.
Also, ginger. With that ridge of fur on their backs. Distinctive character design.
And I like the dogs in the pictures. They've got such poise they look like they're going even when they're standing still. If that makes any sense.
The Matrix human form is, in my head, played by Karen Gillen.
And, okay, I started out thinking, if KG was a dog what dog would she be, which she might possibly find unflattering.
But I didn't quite want a werewolf, I wanted something a bit more civilised, and starting with a dog seems like that to me.
So in the Matrix she has a dog form and a human form and both there and in the flesh she has something drawing on the best of each.
What makes them a threat to civilisation?
Well if the civ you want is supposed to have humans in it, an infectious bite could be considered a problem.
And if the tweaks are advanced biotech, making it infectious, or like a poison in the bite, seems to fit.
So these might be perfectly nice hyperintelligent aggressive augmented near-humans, but if they can actively recruit, they become a problem.
There could also be Khan type problems. You don't know if they're a Khan or a Bashir until you get a long term sample of their work. And with their brains, they are quite likely to look at the world and think of all the ways it could work better.
I'm tempted to give them the GURPS advantage Dominance, which is an infectious attack that makes the infected into the same variety of creature but enslaved to the will of their sire. They can grow out of it, with enough character points, which means enough experience. Keep them sitting around doing nothing, keep them slaves, but the more active, the more quickly they work out how to get free. It would be a reasonable safety precaution too, to make sure newbies have someone in control of their powers until one can be sure that someone is them. If you're going to engineer an infectious advantage it's a very logical way to do it.
Doing that with all the types though... well among other things, I don't see how there'd be a world to discover, it would be one big supernatural war. ... biotech analogues of supernatural, but still.
Dragon guy could be all snakey temptations and subtle corruptions. Power behind the throne type. Or he could be all inspiring and seem like the best idea in the room. Leader his own self. Snakey is kind of more fun. ... snakey is more like how I'd want to do it...
Dog lady being a pack type is tempting. Loyal to her group, protective of her chosen... ferocious and fearless to the rest of the world. And if she's a lion killer there should be lions.
Lion guy is a dick. Have you met lions? Lionesses can be okay, but the dudes, they're just total dicks.
Lions think they're in charge, and they're always fighting other lions. They get all those ladies around to do the hunting and the hard work and look after the cubs, and then if a new lion comes in and beats the old guy and there's cubs around, new guy will kill them. Bastards. And the rest of the time they're just lazy.
Yet they turn up looking cool in all the stories. How do they manage that?
So there's a lion man. He has a big mane. He's super strong and has claws and teeth and hence is not very articulate in human type languages, without biting his tongue. Strong silent type.
He collects women.
And there won't be many lioness women in the hundred, because they weren't stocking up like noah, they were making prototypes or studying captives.
So, he's a big strong stinky male who wants women. But doesn't talk much.
Someone thinks he's the Beast in a Beauty and the Beast story.
*facepalm*
I don't know a name for him yet.
If there's a dragon and a lion there should be a unicorn around somewhere.
The trouble is the unicorn is a really tough character design to make look remotely non stupid.
I mean, someone has a horn in the middle of their forehead.
They're just a walking joke, looking like that.
Also if you keep any of the horse looking bits, or the more complicated descriptions with goat beards and funny tails, it just gets progressively harder to make someone look anything other than daft.
You could just have a unicorn. They still look silly, but in ways people are used to. They might only have a humanoid form in the Matrix. There's no reason why not.
Unicorns are associated with curing poisons, and I made dragon guy be the poison guy, so we know they don't get along. And lions fight unicorns, tis well known.
If they have just a spiral bit in the middle of their forehead it could look more like Teal'c tat than like an actual huge long horn. Like it's the idea of a horn.
But why would you even have one of those?
I mean, if you're designing this whole creature, why put a horn on it?
I can imagine making it an injector but it would be a very silly one.
Possibly unicorns are too silly.
Or possibly they're dudes with goat beards and little spiral caps on their forehead.
Animals and traditional horror types are both rich to draw on. But horror things are kind of heavy on your basic dead dude walking model. It's a bit boring.
The german expressionist films we've been watching are heavy on the hypnotic dominance and people sleepwalking into doing terrible things dominated by a charismatic leader. One theory dude reckoned it expressed a pervasive fear that turned into the horror of World War II. Sleepwalking into being evil because some boss dude tells them so.
It's like fear of zombies. It's not zombies eat your brains, it's fear of becoming zombies. and it's like the start of Shaun of the Dead, where everyone is shuffling through their commutes and jobs and looking totally lifeless already.
Beings that were animate but not using the traditional life processes could be in a coffin down there somewhere. Bit boring though.
Animals have a lot of variety.
Tentacle dudes are reliably creepy. Octopus uplifts. They too smart already.
Uplifts are when animals get human level intelligence. They're one of the many ways you can imagine some biotech dude proving he's clever. You don't need to meet alien intelligence, you just make it.
So a lot of these dudes, even the already described, could be uplifts as easily as human-ish.
Once you start mixing the genes up, how can you tell anyway? Where do you draw the line?
It's all a bit Dark Angel as well, with the many different types.
There'd be people in there that look absolutely ordinary.
Those you have to wonder what's going on with their insides.
Or what they did to piss someone off that much they got frozen in there.
There's beings in there just like elves and dwarves and orcs and everything.
Because if humans can imagine it, somebody somewhere is going to turn themselves into it.
Still though, thinking of 100 different types of monster, that's going to take some thinking.
And probably quite a lot of looking up what other shows already did.
I think a lot of the problem is I'm spinning variations on shows that had like a hundred, two hundred, many plus hundreds of episodes, and I keep trying to invent it all in advance. None of them ever did that. They just made stories and made up something to fill up episodes as they went along. But sitting here looking at the finished heap of them, it's easy to look and think, what if I had a go at doing insect aliens right? Or plants that do mind control. Or smart dinosaurs. Or... the rest of the shelf of Doctor Who titles, I don't even know, you can steals from Doctor Who and never run out. And DW steals from everywhere so it's a whole circle of inspiration. But then I take all these bits and try how they would fit together. And usually they would fit like Daleks meeting Cybermen: Fight!
So every time I invent a monster, I invent it being in a fight with all the other monsters. And the ones that abandoned them, and labelled them all monsters in the first place, they reckoned they were at war with all the actual humans. And that's not even starting on the Mind Emulation citizens. Thousands of MEs, mostly from minds copied before the breakdown, with all sorts of attitudes.
And then there's three sides, human biotech monster, but they fractal into a bazillion sides each.
Plus if the war went to the human purity types on this world, that doesn't mean it did everywhere.
It's more fun thinking this stuff up than writing story down.
At least up to a point. Hopefully the story will need told eventually.
I should maybe not start with what animal to steals or creepy monster to copy.
The basics are all in what they need humanity for, and how they treat them.
Some of them want food, some want host bodies, some want somewhere to lay their eggs or make carry their squirmy offspring to maturity, some want mates, or slaves, or worshippers. Or to be friends. And some just want to ignore us and use the same rocks we want to be standing on. Some of them want us to fight for their amusement or our improvement, and some want to teach us stuff, for roughly the same reasons. Some just want us all dead. Some want to turn us all into them. Is that all the reasons? Different body shapes with the same attitude won't be different enough to be interesting. That's a long way short of 100 then. Even if you split out 'food' into, like, blood and liver and stuff, and really, there's nothing a whole human can make that a civilisation advanced enough to be bioengineering these dudes couldn't make in a can for commercial consumption, so food isn't a good reason. Wanting the same rocks we're standing on could be the same water or specific chemical like gold or uranium or wanting to put their solar power cells where we put our wind farms or whatever. Still not very varied.
So I can think of bazillions of sides... but they're all in fairly similar categories.
Oh, some will be using biotech and some dead tech. That, like, doubles things.
Biotech people think that use of dead tech makes it too easy to just not care, because you can abandon it and come back later and not suffer for it. Dead tech people think biotechnicians are way too used to exploiting other life forms. Probably some other attitudes too.
You don't need many categories to get lots of stories. I mean there's whole genres that work on just boy meets girl. Boy made of metal meets girl made of uplifted biogadgets might add some new twists, but then again might not, given how thoroughly mined the area is. But people still like the more of the same.
... I still like the guy meets guy more of the same. I read a ton of them. I don't need much variety.
Setting up too many conflicts will be as boring as too few. Everything would grind and mash, there'd be no time to explore any particular part, and nothing would ever get resolved. Boring.
I should just stick with the story I have so far: Terran adventure party meets Biotech adventurers, proceed to lost city together, accidentally blow it up. Facilitate escape of crucial part. Who is called Arty. Then must get him back in the box, or go in boxes themselves.
That's plenty of episode. And 14 characters already. Which is very plenty extra many.
Trying to invent the whole universe in advance is not extra helpful.
I haven't got very deep into those reasons yet, but they involve two distinct attitudes to dead tech, plus a lot of specialist tech that takes some explaining for why they're carting it around. Like the guy that wears a living ghillie suit and grows grenades. What kind of guy feels the need to wear all that? And what's it like back home, if everyone can grow their own? The bug lady is interesting, because bugs for communication and bugs for surveillance are the same sneaky little bugs. The one with the symbiote has a whole civilisation sketched in, the way the City on the Sea developed and all the ways they live with their symbiotes, but her specific reason for going to the City that was Lost will be interesting. As will the reaction of that city to her. Language lady, horse guy, and dead tech lady I know the reasons for - collect the stories, prove the horses can cross the distance while collecting the cryptozoology, find more dead tech. But what civilisations do they come from? Is horse guy from some nomadic dudes, or is he just the used car salesman of his people? Is dead tech lady from a rebel people or just a rebel within her people? I get to figure it all out. It's fun.
But then there's the City itself. As far as the City is concerned the Earth people and the biotech people are just as foreign. They're all ten thousand years distant. So that's three sides with multiple factions each.
And then within the City there are the Lost, each and all beings who were rejected by those who evacuated and tried to shut the city behind them. Up to 100 different monsters.
Those are going to be fun to invent.
Every time I invent something I define something about those who built them and those who rejected them. Every single one of them seemed like a good idea to some biotechnician somewhere, and every last one seemed like a really bad idea right around the same time the planetary scale climate control was breaking down and the city was lost to the ice. Which was about the same time the interplanetary gates stopped being used.
So they're kind of a pot of a hundred ways to collapse a civilisation.
Things they could fight about, things they could be defeated by.
Though since the planet is full of basic humans now, not things that won that particular planet.
The Giant Capertiller that hooks all the minds together makes the City computer. It's the mind of the City, basically. But the City has some autonomous responses the Capertiller can't control.
Arty, the first monster out, I've been thinking is a little bit dragon, a little bit hypnotic. Persuasive. The more you hang around with him, the more he seems to have really good ideas. Especially if you're in a small room with little air circulation. Pheromonal control. Stargate only went there a couple of times and had a magic reset button for it, but really, that's seriously powerful stuff. Stuff you breathe that makes you think different? Powerful. Add that this guy is the smartest guy in the Matrix, and you have a planet killer bad guy.
A planet killer who cannot at first get out of the City.
Then there's the wolf lady. Or, not wolf, because who starts with raw wolf when you've had so many generations to tinker with the genome for useful traits? Dog lady. Yes, the b word becomes obvious. She's only slightly less smart than Arty. I was thinking Ylva, for ulfr (which should have accents on it somewhere), for wolf. But now I'm thinking of starting with a Rhodesian Ridgeback. Loyal, loving, devoted, intelligent, independent, stubborn, protective. Designed to hunt lions. Fearless.
Also, ginger. With that ridge of fur on their backs. Distinctive character design.
And I like the dogs in the pictures. They've got such poise they look like they're going even when they're standing still. If that makes any sense.
The Matrix human form is, in my head, played by Karen Gillen.
And, okay, I started out thinking, if KG was a dog what dog would she be, which she might possibly find unflattering.
But I didn't quite want a werewolf, I wanted something a bit more civilised, and starting with a dog seems like that to me.
So in the Matrix she has a dog form and a human form and both there and in the flesh she has something drawing on the best of each.
What makes them a threat to civilisation?
Well if the civ you want is supposed to have humans in it, an infectious bite could be considered a problem.
And if the tweaks are advanced biotech, making it infectious, or like a poison in the bite, seems to fit.
So these might be perfectly nice hyperintelligent aggressive augmented near-humans, but if they can actively recruit, they become a problem.
There could also be Khan type problems. You don't know if they're a Khan or a Bashir until you get a long term sample of their work. And with their brains, they are quite likely to look at the world and think of all the ways it could work better.
I'm tempted to give them the GURPS advantage Dominance, which is an infectious attack that makes the infected into the same variety of creature but enslaved to the will of their sire. They can grow out of it, with enough character points, which means enough experience. Keep them sitting around doing nothing, keep them slaves, but the more active, the more quickly they work out how to get free. It would be a reasonable safety precaution too, to make sure newbies have someone in control of their powers until one can be sure that someone is them. If you're going to engineer an infectious advantage it's a very logical way to do it.
Doing that with all the types though... well among other things, I don't see how there'd be a world to discover, it would be one big supernatural war. ... biotech analogues of supernatural, but still.
Dragon guy could be all snakey temptations and subtle corruptions. Power behind the throne type. Or he could be all inspiring and seem like the best idea in the room. Leader his own self. Snakey is kind of more fun. ... snakey is more like how I'd want to do it...
Dog lady being a pack type is tempting. Loyal to her group, protective of her chosen... ferocious and fearless to the rest of the world. And if she's a lion killer there should be lions.
Lion guy is a dick. Have you met lions? Lionesses can be okay, but the dudes, they're just total dicks.
Lions think they're in charge, and they're always fighting other lions. They get all those ladies around to do the hunting and the hard work and look after the cubs, and then if a new lion comes in and beats the old guy and there's cubs around, new guy will kill them. Bastards. And the rest of the time they're just lazy.
Yet they turn up looking cool in all the stories. How do they manage that?
So there's a lion man. He has a big mane. He's super strong and has claws and teeth and hence is not very articulate in human type languages, without biting his tongue. Strong silent type.
He collects women.
And there won't be many lioness women in the hundred, because they weren't stocking up like noah, they were making prototypes or studying captives.
So, he's a big strong stinky male who wants women. But doesn't talk much.
Someone thinks he's the Beast in a Beauty and the Beast story.
*facepalm*
I don't know a name for him yet.
If there's a dragon and a lion there should be a unicorn around somewhere.
The trouble is the unicorn is a really tough character design to make look remotely non stupid.
I mean, someone has a horn in the middle of their forehead.
They're just a walking joke, looking like that.
Also if you keep any of the horse looking bits, or the more complicated descriptions with goat beards and funny tails, it just gets progressively harder to make someone look anything other than daft.
You could just have a unicorn. They still look silly, but in ways people are used to. They might only have a humanoid form in the Matrix. There's no reason why not.
Unicorns are associated with curing poisons, and I made dragon guy be the poison guy, so we know they don't get along. And lions fight unicorns, tis well known.
If they have just a spiral bit in the middle of their forehead it could look more like Teal'c tat than like an actual huge long horn. Like it's the idea of a horn.
But why would you even have one of those?
I mean, if you're designing this whole creature, why put a horn on it?
I can imagine making it an injector but it would be a very silly one.
Possibly unicorns are too silly.
Or possibly they're dudes with goat beards and little spiral caps on their forehead.
Animals and traditional horror types are both rich to draw on. But horror things are kind of heavy on your basic dead dude walking model. It's a bit boring.
The german expressionist films we've been watching are heavy on the hypnotic dominance and people sleepwalking into doing terrible things dominated by a charismatic leader. One theory dude reckoned it expressed a pervasive fear that turned into the horror of World War II. Sleepwalking into being evil because some boss dude tells them so.
It's like fear of zombies. It's not zombies eat your brains, it's fear of becoming zombies. and it's like the start of Shaun of the Dead, where everyone is shuffling through their commutes and jobs and looking totally lifeless already.
Beings that were animate but not using the traditional life processes could be in a coffin down there somewhere. Bit boring though.
Animals have a lot of variety.
Tentacle dudes are reliably creepy. Octopus uplifts. They too smart already.
Uplifts are when animals get human level intelligence. They're one of the many ways you can imagine some biotech dude proving he's clever. You don't need to meet alien intelligence, you just make it.
So a lot of these dudes, even the already described, could be uplifts as easily as human-ish.
Once you start mixing the genes up, how can you tell anyway? Where do you draw the line?
It's all a bit Dark Angel as well, with the many different types.
There'd be people in there that look absolutely ordinary.
Those you have to wonder what's going on with their insides.
Or what they did to piss someone off that much they got frozen in there.
There's beings in there just like elves and dwarves and orcs and everything.
Because if humans can imagine it, somebody somewhere is going to turn themselves into it.
Still though, thinking of 100 different types of monster, that's going to take some thinking.
And probably quite a lot of looking up what other shows already did.
I think a lot of the problem is I'm spinning variations on shows that had like a hundred, two hundred, many plus hundreds of episodes, and I keep trying to invent it all in advance. None of them ever did that. They just made stories and made up something to fill up episodes as they went along. But sitting here looking at the finished heap of them, it's easy to look and think, what if I had a go at doing insect aliens right? Or plants that do mind control. Or smart dinosaurs. Or... the rest of the shelf of Doctor Who titles, I don't even know, you can steals from Doctor Who and never run out. And DW steals from everywhere so it's a whole circle of inspiration. But then I take all these bits and try how they would fit together. And usually they would fit like Daleks meeting Cybermen: Fight!
So every time I invent a monster, I invent it being in a fight with all the other monsters. And the ones that abandoned them, and labelled them all monsters in the first place, they reckoned they were at war with all the actual humans. And that's not even starting on the Mind Emulation citizens. Thousands of MEs, mostly from minds copied before the breakdown, with all sorts of attitudes.
And then there's three sides, human biotech monster, but they fractal into a bazillion sides each.
Plus if the war went to the human purity types on this world, that doesn't mean it did everywhere.
It's more fun thinking this stuff up than writing story down.
At least up to a point. Hopefully the story will need told eventually.
I should maybe not start with what animal to steals or creepy monster to copy.
The basics are all in what they need humanity for, and how they treat them.
Some of them want food, some want host bodies, some want somewhere to lay their eggs or make carry their squirmy offspring to maturity, some want mates, or slaves, or worshippers. Or to be friends. And some just want to ignore us and use the same rocks we want to be standing on. Some of them want us to fight for their amusement or our improvement, and some want to teach us stuff, for roughly the same reasons. Some just want us all dead. Some want to turn us all into them. Is that all the reasons? Different body shapes with the same attitude won't be different enough to be interesting. That's a long way short of 100 then. Even if you split out 'food' into, like, blood and liver and stuff, and really, there's nothing a whole human can make that a civilisation advanced enough to be bioengineering these dudes couldn't make in a can for commercial consumption, so food isn't a good reason. Wanting the same rocks we're standing on could be the same water or specific chemical like gold or uranium or wanting to put their solar power cells where we put our wind farms or whatever. Still not very varied.
So I can think of bazillions of sides... but they're all in fairly similar categories.
Oh, some will be using biotech and some dead tech. That, like, doubles things.
Biotech people think that use of dead tech makes it too easy to just not care, because you can abandon it and come back later and not suffer for it. Dead tech people think biotechnicians are way too used to exploiting other life forms. Probably some other attitudes too.
You don't need many categories to get lots of stories. I mean there's whole genres that work on just boy meets girl. Boy made of metal meets girl made of uplifted biogadgets might add some new twists, but then again might not, given how thoroughly mined the area is. But people still like the more of the same.
... I still like the guy meets guy more of the same. I read a ton of them. I don't need much variety.
Setting up too many conflicts will be as boring as too few. Everything would grind and mash, there'd be no time to explore any particular part, and nothing would ever get resolved. Boring.
I should just stick with the story I have so far: Terran adventure party meets Biotech adventurers, proceed to lost city together, accidentally blow it up. Facilitate escape of crucial part. Who is called Arty. Then must get him back in the box, or go in boxes themselves.
That's plenty of episode. And 14 characters already. Which is very plenty extra many.
Trying to invent the whole universe in advance is not extra helpful.