10-03-2018, 11:18 AM | #1111 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Can people be rescued from Midas? Or was the transition to gold too traumatic?
It seems that some fluids are immune, such as air. Maybe magma is also immune, meaning only the crust is made of gold. Here's a thought: maybe the effect takes hours now, but that's because it's spread over the entire planet's surface. There may be an entire city that was flash-transformed, meaning that aircraft might discover it and some people might have survived, albiet in some cases dented from a fall or something. |
10-03-2018, 11:59 AM | #1112 | |||||
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
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Air isn't immune, per se. About half of it has turned into gold: that's why you have only double the pressure, despite four times the gravitational pull. In order for the gravity to do what it does, the core probably needs to be gold. Quote:
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Parts of the earth were certainly transformed faster than others. My thought is that the change to gold agonizingly killed most of humanity, but if you can discover the places nearest to the origin, where the change was fastest, you probably can recover some folks. Remember that looking around is tough though: airplanes have double the lift, but 4 times the weight, and vehicles will slowly turn into gold themselves!
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10-03-2018, 12:19 PM | #1113 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
One thing that could make Midas even more interesting is if a quirk of paratronics made it so gold could go to Midas but could not leave Midas. If someone stayed too long, they would be trapped.
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10-03-2018, 02:22 PM | #1114 | |
Join Date: Jun 2017
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
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A gold planet would cool rapidly, as mentioned it is much more thermally conductive, so the surface temperature will go up and the rate the planet radiates heat away will increase. Also, there will be no radioisotopes to keep the core warm. It would still be thousands to millions of years for the planet to cool fully, but it would be an issue on a geologic scale. |
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10-03-2018, 03:14 PM | #1115 |
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Or that gold from Midas that had always been gold could be "infectious". Of course even identifying it could be quite difficult.
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10-03-2018, 07:48 PM | #1116 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Would non-Midasian gold-plating insulate against the effect? It can't turn something to gold that already is, after all.
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10-08-2018, 11:34 PM | #1117 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
Circa 1954, Null-Tolkien-8* saw an uptick in banestorm activity that brought several hundred thousand Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, and Orcs appearing around Earth. The creatures all have full episodic retrograde amnesia, but do know the language of the region they appeared in, plus any languages they knew before.
Later, Homeline discovered Null-Tolkien-8b, which saw the same event occur in 1892. Both worldlines are no-mana, and it appears that in both cases the beings appeared 40 years ago by homeline time. That puts NT8a at 1994, and NT8b at 1932. In both cases, the USA and Britain adapted very well, with other countries doing somewhat less well all the way down to outright genocide. *Null-Tolkien-1 through -7 aren't odd at all, aside form being somewhat boring in most cases. Apparently the author's survival is a bit of a low-probability event, considering he's missing from a surprising number of worlds. |
10-09-2018, 04:59 AM | #1118 |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
I really do not think that less than a million nonhumans appearing would qualify as a weird parallel (the transportation of large populations is just a fact of the setting). Now, what would make a weird setting is if fifty percent of the population became nonhuman and the people of the world accepted it without an uptick of violence. A few decades after the event, you would have orcs being elected President of the USA, goblins on cable TV discussing the immorality associated with violent video games, elves receiving Oscars for their portrayals of WW II soldiers, and dwarves protesting the genocide of the ents who protect the Sumatran rainforest. When asked about the Change, you would probably have a conversation similar to this:
Bob: "I Changed into a dwarf during the second wave of '88, right around the time that my parents got their first computer. A few kids made fun of my short size, but that stopped after I tossed one of the humans into a pond. After I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with my BS in computer science in '99, I started up my first company, an online photo clearing house, and sold it within three months for $5 million to a group of frenzied investors right before the tech collapse. After 9/11, I saw a need for better prosthetics for nonhuman women soldiers, so I started up..." |
10-09-2018, 07:39 AM | #1119 | |||||
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
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I haven't seen much in the way of bane-storms in the setting. In addition, I'd think one that mixes up species is pretty weird, even for bane-storms. And the aging effects are going to be a big deal. The location of where everyone ended up is a big deal, as well of how densely/remotely the new comers showed up. If they all show up in isolated communities in the hinterlands, that's one thing, but if they appear on the streets of the major cities in ones and twos, that's another. Quote:
I can't think of a scenario where this doesn't end up destroying a chain of worlds or at the very least killing a lot of good agents. Though I you're looking for a non-traditional threat for ISWAT to handle, there you go. Quote:
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You already can get trapped there from staying too long, because your conveyor turns into gold and stops working, or you die from gold poisoning. But the gold refusing to leave might be a simpler method than it rapidly returning to its previous state. Though that kills the "Rescue a victim" plot-line. Quote:
Did we ever get an idea of just how high the temperature would get? We could do a different midas that is the massive red-got ball of molten gold. Of course, that might just be a vanish.
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10-09-2018, 10:36 AM | #1120 | ||
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels
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Though expanding on the protective gold idea, imagine coating a space suit in gold in some low tech world with easy access gold only for someone to steal the super expensive thing. (Also intriguing explanation for some Midas adjacent worlds' pictographs of space suits.) Or perhaps even hint at immune cross-timers like the old episode of Buck Rogers: The Golden Man.
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Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check. Last edited by Flyndaran; 10-09-2018 at 10:40 AM. |
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