@marian.hawke

[championofsnark]

Hello you lot. I know people might still be pissed about what went down, so ignore if you don't want an update, however.

So Riverstone sent us medical reports but since I don't know what any of it means, if someone with modern/medical know-how wants to look and explain shite, I'll send it to you. These are the summaries I think I understood:

Our powers don't seem to be biological? So when we used them they didn't show any biological changes? I think? Don't know what that means.

I agreed to do a dream study to try and figure out why I keep showing up in your dreams, they said strangely our brains appear completely awake when we're doing it. No wonder I'm bloody tired.

Also can someone who's been around for a bit explain what the Mariana Trench was?

Added: I got weary of not letting other people take the buck on this one, they gave us the name James Henries and said if we told you lot they'd lose their advantage. Hopefully not, but there you go!

Comments

[evocation]

clarke and i had a whole talk about this
calling it an implant trips people up, that's all
they start mixing it up with the brain implant
can we circle back to the magic thing?

[impede]

Magic isn't real. We're just strangely able to traverse the earth in mere seconds.

[evocation]

i'm just saying
if someone quotes arthur c clarke to me i'm going to murder them
and no jury would convict me

[impede]

And gods never hand out powers just to see what might come of it.

[evocation]

yeah
there aren't actual gods where i'm from
or at least not ones that gave a shit about humans
so that was harder for me to wrap my head around
but you know
shit here has made me rethink that

[impede]

Apparently certain people think we'll lose our head if we're able to approach that theory in the least. Certain people that you know quite well.

[evocation]

i think people are just freaked out
and i mean
i met plenty of people back home who bragged about being super logical and then didn't want to consider magic as its own thing, you know?
people don't like to admit some things are just beyond our ability to write textbooks about

[impede]

I don't believe Lance Sweets is freaked out.

[evocation]

why do you say that?

[impede]

His previous situation dealt with gods of a sort, or those who could be defined as such by someone too narrow in their understanding. Whether he chooses to admit it or not, he doesn't think we should chase the most viable lead without proof, even if we have tons of it, because of how people behaved there.

I've decided that he likes to control how people think or act, even if it requires an omittance of truth.

[wittingly]

The phenomenon we call magic, much like the phenomenon we call gravity. There's a physics to it, a science, we just don't understand it yet. We called a lot of things magic back in the dark ages that we later learned how to explain.

[evocation]

ughhhh
ian
you really are arthur c clarkeing me
don't be boring

[impede]

I look forward to him explaining how we travel the globe in the blink of an eye.

[wittingly]

I look forward to learning myself! We could do amazing things with that once we understand it.

[impede]

A man with an ego large enough to believe he can harness the power of gods.

[wittingly]

To clarify, I wasn't being literal. I thought that might've been obvious. There's no way in hell I personally am going to learn it, what I mean is I look forward to humanity learning it and me studying what we find collectively.

[impede]

You're missing a critical piece of information in your callous disregard of magic.

This world may accept the existence of magic, and prove that it's real.

[wittingly]

I'm not saying we disregard it. I'm saying we understand it as magic now because we don't know enough about it. What we call it is irrelevant. The phenomenon is real, I'm not denying that.

[impede]

What you don't understand is that magic is not simply a lack of understanding. I've seen science applied to supernatural events. But the events themselves were still supernatural in nature. You can combine the two, but you have to accept the true nature of one thing to approach the other.

Right now, you're implying that magic is an explanation for the ignorant.

[wittingly]

I choose to be boring until I die.

[evocation]

you're my greatest disappointment
okay look
you're awesome, you're smart as hell, but back home there's been like, entire teams of fucking geniuses with funding trying to put magic in a box, you know?
and they can't
and when someone's daughter is possessed, or their husband is cursed, they don't call stephen hawking to physics their way out of it
they call people like me, or sam and dean
or shit, maybe some of them even pray to gods like thor and loki
it doesn't matter if maybe possibly there's some equation we'll figure out in the distant future that will totally explain why my best friend back home can make bullet wounds disappear in a few seconds or why we can share dreams here
right now, we don't have it, and we're nowhere close to it
so how does it help us?
isn't it just muddying the waters whenever we try to discuss this stuff?

[wittingly]

It took until the year 1800AD for John Dalton to prove the existence of the Atom. Science takes a while. We're still trying to understand and measure the properties of the Higgs boson, and thanks to the large hadron collider we're STILL discovering new particles predicted by supersymmetric theories

Just because they haven't pinned it down yet doesn't mean they won't

I don't see how what we believe about the nature of it changes anything about what it is. I don't need to give up on my passion for learning about it just because we don't already have the answers.

[evocation]

yeah
and i'm saying i'm passionate about learning magic, too
i live and breathe this stuff
our understanding of it might not be explained by some undiscovered particle or rule of physics
in my experience you find more important, directly usable information digging into the non scientific evidence
folklore, mythology, history, cultural touchstones
i think that's where we're going to find our answers here
not through blood tests

[wittingly]

I'm not saying you're wrong. The methodology you use back home to deal with supernatural phenomenon obviously works, and may wind up working here as well.

I want to understand the science behind that, too. The lore, I mean. I'm an engineer, not a particle physicist, so it's with a grain of salt that I pitch the idea, but

I wonder if the answer can't be found in string theory. Somehow where you're from maybe species have evolved to interact with and influence reality organically the same way that

I don't know

bats use echolocation, or fish see in ultraviolet light

Your approach works short term, but with enough learning it may one day be possible to come up with even more effective, efficient approaches to dealing with threats or interacting with it in general

Not here and now, obviously, this is a purely hypothetical discussion

[evocation]

yeah, i know, every discussion the displaced has is hypothetical
maybe that's half our problem
my 'short term solutions' have saved a lot of people, by the way, and they're based in thousands of years of study and practice
i don't need some kind of midichlorian explanation to make a tangible difference, and i don't think that's something we should be reaching for right now