![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI was thinking on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the end of Angel, which I still haven't got around to rewatching because I just somehow can't commit to watching every character I care about suffer that bad and mostly die.
Specifically I was thinking about time differentials in hell.
In the Buffy episode Anne it's stated that one day of Earth time is like a hundred years in that particular hell. Which seems like an overestimate, given that people were getting spit back out as elders, but maybe they only kept them overnight and a whole 24 hours is a whole hundred years? Not especially important in the specifics, keep it as a ballpark.
I was thinking that this temporal differential could in itself be a complete explanation for why hells are so different. And kind of suck.
I mean they'd literally suck if you got a siphon effect going, the flow would speed up so hugely on the other side of the gate that a very small gravity assist would make a very big flow, and maybe that happens to whatever it is people do magic with? And it flows into the are of a hellmouth and so enriches it, but then through into hell, powering it up a bit? But not very much, because it would be trickle slow from the perspective of the hell people. Hence hells that are all dark and dull and full of hungry. Because they don't get much coming in even if they try.
If they run 100 years to 1 day then they run 36,500 years to a year, or 36,500 billion years on a hell world to one billion years on Earth. And that would matter because that's waaaaaay past the estimate for solar life times. It's past the estimate for some universes. Our universe is a tiny, tiny fraction of the age that that hell dimension would be, if it started at the same time as ours. It could start a really long time after ours and still be way ahead on the whole heat death timetable. So they could be really screwed for energy sources.
Hence importing them from here, a currently wealthier universe.
And okay, some hells are supposed to be about dead people, that's beyond the scope of what the time difference can explain. But the ones that are just funny looking humanoids preying on Earth humans? They could be in a tapped out dimension, looking to parasitise ours. The hundred years in a day thing pretty much implies that, whether you call those taking advantage of it demons or fairies or whatever.
LA getting pulled into hell would be a real coup in some respects, but it would turn a farm into a feast. Not a renewable resource anymore. You get what you get, one gulp only. Not optimally efficient. Earth won't have time to rebuild in any useful to hells timescale, and by the time the sun rises all the LA already eaten will pretty much be dead. Definitely by the time it rises twice. Unless they find a way to have like normal lives down there, but they'd have the same energy constraints and maybe have to live in the dark, so, difficult.
But the other thing is that time around the portals seems to run funny as well. Like, when Buffy gets pulled through, it hasn't been long for the person pulled through just ahead of her, even though logically it should have been aaaaaaaages just in a few minutes. And time differential around a portal should just kill anyone who tries to go through cold dead. I mean, if your hand has been there a few days before your arm gets through, that hand is dead and starting to rot. Before your head even makes it to the surface on the slow side, you have serious problems in the far side, because your heart can no way pump nutrients fast enough to feed the other side. And if your heart goes through then the slow side has a gigantic blood pressure problem of a sudden, like splash level problem. And if your brain is on the quick side without all your organs then it's pretty much going to die of oxygen starvation really really quickly. And if the front half of your brain is experiencing a whole day while your back half is still pushing through then you have serious problems of other sorts. Time differential: very very deadly. (Is that a thing with black holes? I should study.) So there has to be either some kind of transitional zone where you speed up but slowly enough to survive it, or some kind of buffering and transmission so you don't in fact so much pass through a portal as change state for a while and get spat out again. Stargate goes with the latter, but it also had that whole episode where they had a black hole on the other side of the gate and time ran differently depending how far away from the gate you are.
So, I was idly daydreaming using portals to go get people out of LA when they choose to be egregiously stupid in that last episode, and then I thought, what if the LA end is still there when the whole kaboodle drops into hell?
I would have accidentally made a new hellmouth, so, that would be a thing.
Closing it would be the only logical response, except if the time differential was abrupt, by the time I wanted to close it, even if it only took a minute to realise what had happened, there would have been aaaaaages for people on the other side to stabilise it open. Again, aaaaaages is not a very specific time, but, consider the problems of magic across a time differential: Every spell you start, they have far longer to figure out, research, and find a counter for. Trying to seal off a hell would be really tricky. Unless they have no energy, but LA would be providing a full on feast that early on. Plenty of human batteries, even if they aren't refilling any more. And they'd have big advantage if they could establish a hellmouth, with a way out, and ability to leech on a new bit of Earth.
Also, closing it would be a logical response, but the certain knowledge that everyone you cared about in LA has just fallen into hell would make one hell of an emotional speedbump. And again, time, on Earth scale, is not on your side.
If closing a portal needs a ritual, like in that Angel episode with the lady who kept being different places, then it needs both time and a flow of magical power. And both of those have probably just been altered by the presence of the new time different hellmouth.
If time is flowing faster near the gate, to get that smooth transition that makes the portal survivable, then it would have an area of effect where time is currently sped up. That area would not reach the sun. So it would stay day or night, whichever, for a reeeeeeaaaally long time. Since most magical recharge rates are calibrated per day, that could be a big problem. You'd run out of juice fast, and new juice would not be flowing. If you go out far enough to recharge, you could be away years. Many years. And who would be guarding the gates?
Also now I'm having visions of logistical problems solved by hourly deliveries of full Tesco vans. I kind of want to do the math. Like, if your hellmouth's guardians are sitting in a time differential of just one year to the day, you would need to ship in a year of food every day. Which is a lot of food. But you'd want to put them as close to the portal as possible so it wouldn't let demons in to form a beachhead? So they might be going even faster? And, also, you'd need replacement guardians really, really fast, and they'd all get years older before any new episodes of anything came out, so they'd be super bored. It would be really difficult to get any volunteers. And, also, it would be really really difficult to get any volunteers there fast enough.
Time differentials are a really tricky problem. Earth should just lose, basically.
Or another way to run the portal is if the time difference isn't at a constant rate, and people can cross over when the times align. When the stars are right, sort of thing. Then you don't have to worry about dying at the portal interface, you don't have to worry about them being able to breed new generations of army in the time it takes you to wake up and notice there's a portal, you'd just have to worry about not having access to the people stuck in the other timeflow until the next time the portal opened.
Or, you know, you could just figure they're all dead before the next time it opens up. That would be depressing.
Or maybe once there's an open, active, portal, the times on the two sides synch... in that location. So it's still reaching into, for instance, LA on the day of the fall, as far as the Earth side of the portal is concerned. It's a time portal as well, then, reaching ever further into the past. As long as it stays open, no faffing about with time... but if you fix things so LA is saved in less than 100 years hell time, it will appear again more or less when it left, and you'd only have records of how you made it happen, and have the next however many time units to actually go make it happen. Even if it involved dying. Because now there's paradox.
Maybe that's how prophecy happens in the first place?
So that's just a whole stack of problems, inherent in the throwaway concept that time in hell travels a hundred years in a day.
I'm not being real coherent about them, but, they're kind of giant.
So that's a whole stack of bunnies.
Specifically I was thinking about time differentials in hell.
In the Buffy episode Anne it's stated that one day of Earth time is like a hundred years in that particular hell. Which seems like an overestimate, given that people were getting spit back out as elders, but maybe they only kept them overnight and a whole 24 hours is a whole hundred years? Not especially important in the specifics, keep it as a ballpark.
I was thinking that this temporal differential could in itself be a complete explanation for why hells are so different. And kind of suck.
I mean they'd literally suck if you got a siphon effect going, the flow would speed up so hugely on the other side of the gate that a very small gravity assist would make a very big flow, and maybe that happens to whatever it is people do magic with? And it flows into the are of a hellmouth and so enriches it, but then through into hell, powering it up a bit? But not very much, because it would be trickle slow from the perspective of the hell people. Hence hells that are all dark and dull and full of hungry. Because they don't get much coming in even if they try.
If they run 100 years to 1 day then they run 36,500 years to a year, or 36,500 billion years on a hell world to one billion years on Earth. And that would matter because that's waaaaaay past the estimate for solar life times. It's past the estimate for some universes. Our universe is a tiny, tiny fraction of the age that that hell dimension would be, if it started at the same time as ours. It could start a really long time after ours and still be way ahead on the whole heat death timetable. So they could be really screwed for energy sources.
Hence importing them from here, a currently wealthier universe.
And okay, some hells are supposed to be about dead people, that's beyond the scope of what the time difference can explain. But the ones that are just funny looking humanoids preying on Earth humans? They could be in a tapped out dimension, looking to parasitise ours. The hundred years in a day thing pretty much implies that, whether you call those taking advantage of it demons or fairies or whatever.
LA getting pulled into hell would be a real coup in some respects, but it would turn a farm into a feast. Not a renewable resource anymore. You get what you get, one gulp only. Not optimally efficient. Earth won't have time to rebuild in any useful to hells timescale, and by the time the sun rises all the LA already eaten will pretty much be dead. Definitely by the time it rises twice. Unless they find a way to have like normal lives down there, but they'd have the same energy constraints and maybe have to live in the dark, so, difficult.
But the other thing is that time around the portals seems to run funny as well. Like, when Buffy gets pulled through, it hasn't been long for the person pulled through just ahead of her, even though logically it should have been aaaaaaaages just in a few minutes. And time differential around a portal should just kill anyone who tries to go through cold dead. I mean, if your hand has been there a few days before your arm gets through, that hand is dead and starting to rot. Before your head even makes it to the surface on the slow side, you have serious problems in the far side, because your heart can no way pump nutrients fast enough to feed the other side. And if your heart goes through then the slow side has a gigantic blood pressure problem of a sudden, like splash level problem. And if your brain is on the quick side without all your organs then it's pretty much going to die of oxygen starvation really really quickly. And if the front half of your brain is experiencing a whole day while your back half is still pushing through then you have serious problems of other sorts. Time differential: very very deadly. (Is that a thing with black holes? I should study.) So there has to be either some kind of transitional zone where you speed up but slowly enough to survive it, or some kind of buffering and transmission so you don't in fact so much pass through a portal as change state for a while and get spat out again. Stargate goes with the latter, but it also had that whole episode where they had a black hole on the other side of the gate and time ran differently depending how far away from the gate you are.
So, I was idly daydreaming using portals to go get people out of LA when they choose to be egregiously stupid in that last episode, and then I thought, what if the LA end is still there when the whole kaboodle drops into hell?
I would have accidentally made a new hellmouth, so, that would be a thing.
Closing it would be the only logical response, except if the time differential was abrupt, by the time I wanted to close it, even if it only took a minute to realise what had happened, there would have been aaaaaages for people on the other side to stabilise it open. Again, aaaaaages is not a very specific time, but, consider the problems of magic across a time differential: Every spell you start, they have far longer to figure out, research, and find a counter for. Trying to seal off a hell would be really tricky. Unless they have no energy, but LA would be providing a full on feast that early on. Plenty of human batteries, even if they aren't refilling any more. And they'd have big advantage if they could establish a hellmouth, with a way out, and ability to leech on a new bit of Earth.
Also, closing it would be a logical response, but the certain knowledge that everyone you cared about in LA has just fallen into hell would make one hell of an emotional speedbump. And again, time, on Earth scale, is not on your side.
If closing a portal needs a ritual, like in that Angel episode with the lady who kept being different places, then it needs both time and a flow of magical power. And both of those have probably just been altered by the presence of the new time different hellmouth.
If time is flowing faster near the gate, to get that smooth transition that makes the portal survivable, then it would have an area of effect where time is currently sped up. That area would not reach the sun. So it would stay day or night, whichever, for a reeeeeeaaaally long time. Since most magical recharge rates are calibrated per day, that could be a big problem. You'd run out of juice fast, and new juice would not be flowing. If you go out far enough to recharge, you could be away years. Many years. And who would be guarding the gates?
Also now I'm having visions of logistical problems solved by hourly deliveries of full Tesco vans. I kind of want to do the math. Like, if your hellmouth's guardians are sitting in a time differential of just one year to the day, you would need to ship in a year of food every day. Which is a lot of food. But you'd want to put them as close to the portal as possible so it wouldn't let demons in to form a beachhead? So they might be going even faster? And, also, you'd need replacement guardians really, really fast, and they'd all get years older before any new episodes of anything came out, so they'd be super bored. It would be really difficult to get any volunteers. And, also, it would be really really difficult to get any volunteers there fast enough.
Time differentials are a really tricky problem. Earth should just lose, basically.
Or another way to run the portal is if the time difference isn't at a constant rate, and people can cross over when the times align. When the stars are right, sort of thing. Then you don't have to worry about dying at the portal interface, you don't have to worry about them being able to breed new generations of army in the time it takes you to wake up and notice there's a portal, you'd just have to worry about not having access to the people stuck in the other timeflow until the next time the portal opened.
Or, you know, you could just figure they're all dead before the next time it opens up. That would be depressing.
Or maybe once there's an open, active, portal, the times on the two sides synch... in that location. So it's still reaching into, for instance, LA on the day of the fall, as far as the Earth side of the portal is concerned. It's a time portal as well, then, reaching ever further into the past. As long as it stays open, no faffing about with time... but if you fix things so LA is saved in less than 100 years hell time, it will appear again more or less when it left, and you'd only have records of how you made it happen, and have the next however many time units to actually go make it happen. Even if it involved dying. Because now there's paradox.
Maybe that's how prophecy happens in the first place?
So that's just a whole stack of problems, inherent in the throwaway concept that time in hell travels a hundred years in a day.
I'm not being real coherent about them, but, they're kind of giant.
So that's a whole stack of bunnies.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2016-08-05 09:13 am (UTC)kerk
no subject
Date: 2016-08-05 09:15 am (UTC)and yes
but time difference was part of several of them
and time difference was what I was thinking on
so.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-05 09:24 am (UTC)Btw, congrats on Norwich Pride :-) I'm on the train down to Glasgow; en route to Belfast for the Pride march tomorrow. Second year in a row. Going to Prides in Glasgow; Derry and Newry later in the month (first Saturday in September for the latter).
kerk
no subject
Date: 2016-08-06 08:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-06 08:34 am (UTC)