The reactions of Ramses, Bess, and Exador
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Very very important!!!!!
We don’t like competition.
we do however like minions, sycophants, peons, slaves and general grovelers….
Well…remember the wizards don’t “know” that’s what they are doing. There is some sort of clue or joint dynamic between summoner and summonee regarding appearance…I don’t pretend to understand it.
As far as reshaping, remember most demons can’t shapeshift, at least not for very long/permanently. Not all Greater Demons can do it. I doubt any Major demons can at all. So really only ArchDemons and Demon Princes can and do reliably shape shift.
And trust me, they do. However, for reasons explained elsewhere, most don’t have more than a few base forms. You really have to practice them/use them to be able to maintain the different forms under duress and without expending excess mana and concentration.
consider this: the demon’s first form is their “lowest energy state” it doesn’t take any work to maintain it, it’s a default state. All other states require more energy to maintain. The more you use the other form, the less energy it takes to maintain it, but you really only so much time in a day…
So again, the older the demon, the more forms they are likely to have, I suspect some of the demon princes probably can shift rapidly and in combat, if they choose, but if they can, the only way you’d know about is if they did in the process of killing you…because I’d guess they’d also kill anyone who saw them materializing chainsaws on the ends of their arms….
[quote=Rosver;431]I read somewhere here that people’s connection to their Gods are broken when they are in the Abyss. [/quote]
Totally missed this. Are the connections broken permanently?
If T. manages to get back to Astlan, will he be able to call on his god again?
Or does he need to be reconnected?Well as opposed to saying the connection is broken it would be better to say the Abyss blocks the connection. The reason, as it was told to me, humans hate the Abyss other than the demons, landscape, and the fact that it is hell, is because any human that dies in the Abyss does not move on to their original afterlife. They just seem to disappear. So it would be better to say the Abyss is a pit from which no soul can escape without aid from a body. The place is freaky and their is something up with it.
I would agree with Maou, that’s how it seems to work.
The place is very weird. Unfortunately, one of the best experts on it is Vice Chancellor Dante of Oorstemoth.
However, being Oorstemothian, he’s hard to interview since pretty much everything he knows is Extra Super Special Fundamentally Trans Top Secret.
He will be joining us in Book 2 as an FYI.
Do the Oorstemothians have proper forms for coups? Also could you never go into great detail about their legal system. It would take far to long. It would get worse if one had to learn under what conditions one could outrank another. They have great memories over their.
Oh, I am very positive you have to fill out a LOT of forms in order to have a coupe, and call me paranoid, but I suspect it’s very hard to get all the paperwork done in order to mount an actually successful coupe.
I’m betting you’d think you’d fill out the forms then have the uprising, kill the current leaders and then…when it’s all done, discover that the paperwork was wrong, you were missing some approvals, probably the approval of someone you just killed.
So then you’d have to find a priest or necromancer and start resurrecting people to unwind the coupe, refill out the paperwork along with paperwork documented the failure of the first coupe, if you got that done, and you could get the approval of the officials you need to kill, so you could kill them, you could then start over.
However, my bet is that you’d then find some new flaw and have to re-unwind the second coupe, and what is the rule about time between failed coupe attempts? You need to make sure you abide by any legally valid “cooling off periods” etc.
Really, not sure it would be worth the effort.
So is their a state more anarchic than the abyss that seems to function, but that seems to be on the exact opposite end of the governmental spectrum from Oorstemoth and is still recognized as a state. I know this is highly unlikely, but does a place of greater anarchy than the abyss exist.
Quite frankly the abyss is quite organized and most fights are small scale or political as the demons seem to not fight directly as those who chose to do so have likely been weeded out by natural selection, unless they were really strong. Immortal hard to kill enemies who can pester you for eternity are very annoying and dangerous. Again this leads to demons trying to destroy each others connections, credibility, and assets. Tom is severely lacking in all of these and is thus a wild card.
I seem to have been sidetracked. Let’s get some more life and discussions about different interpretations and answers to what I have stated above.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by anarchic.
Oorstemoth provides a fairly plebian/democractic sort of hell. Meaning, the crap you have to put up with is pretty similar regardless of your social rank, class, wealth, power. The bureaucracy effects everyone one fairly evenly.
In the Abyss, I wouldn’t call things that stable. There are a lot of stalemates though. Lots of Mutual Assured Destruction. Paranoia, and the strong really take the vast majority of the cake, so to speak. It sucks to not be powerful in the Abyss.
However, to be powerful requires constant vigilance and paranoia because there is always someone out there waiting to take you out if you slip up even a hair. So I guess that’s not truly paranoia…
One of the reasons Boggy and I recommend newbies hang out in caves is so they can get their bearings before being thrust into full demon on demon politics and machinations. Personally, I have no patience for the crazy games these demons in the courts play.
Tom came from a mid-tech variation of Earth, so some high tech iterations, which met the progenitors of the dragons must have tech beyond are own. And if so should it not be in the Abyss somewhere, perhaps the boom gate is an example of this tech.
Does that mean that they perhaps posses quantum computers, interactive holographic projections, virtual reality games, spacecraft capable of exceeding the speed of light, massive wifi hotspots, A.I’s, or anything else that might indicate that the demons posses the technology to travel the stars as some of them in their previous mortal human form?
I know that most of it is stolen and jerry-rigged, but with so much time, some of them must have devoted themselves to science like Len and magic. Knowledge is power, and many demons seem to love power. The abyss is mostly devoid of entertainment, so some demons must have decided to expand intellectual pursuits in the hope of permanently improving their living standards for both profit and safety. If somebody down their is capable of making a tv and channels, all others will allow them to live as it would relieve some of the monotony of their eternal lives.
The abyss is one of the least interesting places one can go given enough time due to the unchanging environment, population, and uniformity. Astlan changes at the very least with the deaths of its people. People know that a greater level of knowledge and technology would lead to better conditions for all, which is why I think their is a library in the abyss somewhere. People hate the place anyways and view the exercise as monotonous in many situations. Perfect for the abyss and some knowledge has to be shared to quickly expand it. Keep what you want hidden, but then let others improve the understanding of something so that you might use it later yourself.
Well, sorry about me, I just can’t get these descripancies in the Abyss out of my mind and it is all to one thing: Temperature.
Most of our technology is so sensitive to temperature. Read the box of your mobile phones and it will show you its range of operating temperature. Buy medicines and in the box it tells you the temperature it must be stored. Buy a clothing and the tag will tell you at what temperature it should be ironed with.
For example, lets take the escallators, one thing that make them work is GREASE. However, at high temperatures, grease fails to become grease and acts more like oil. Oil as lubricant in machinery isn’t really going to work. That should have make any escallators (or almost any such mechanical devices) to malfunction.
Its quite simple really, most materials just behave differently at different temperatures. Most of our devices are designed to work at ‘normal’ temperatures. If Demons just steal these technology without major modifications, and if the Abyss is as hellish as it is described, many would not function at all.
Agreed on temperature.
The courts are much cooler, and the Notorious Dame is essentially air conditioned (magically).
When humans/elves/mortals get hauled before a demon prince, it’s typically in the courts, and typically at the Notorious Dame. That’s also where the most of the dungeons are (there are multiple ones, of course) the temperature has to be at least livable for the toys in the dungeon (humans/elves/etc). A good sweat is nice, expiring of heat stroke before you can rip out a single toe-nail is not useful.
I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say that when Lillith realizes that the demon that caught Talarius and stole mana from a god is the same “Tom” demon that Antefalken’s been talking about, she will invite them for a visit/a stay. One appealing thing would be that there, Talarius would be able to get out of his armor.
And, assuming (not saying it will happen) they go there, Lillith will probably want to corrupt Talarius/seduce him…she’d need him in peak operating form, if you will.
“Talarius would be able to get out of his armor.” – surrounded by demons, I think, that is the last thing he would do.
Cooler, so you say, but 50 degrees centigrade still isn’t going to be kind to many of the machinery.
I wonder who is supplying the energy/mana to aircondition the Dame? I like to do some mathematics on it, calculate how powerful an airconditioner is needed to do that.
Also, you say they are slothfu, but the work necessary for building those metal and concrete buildings (and obviously, changed often), maintenance for cars, escallators, elevators and other machinery, and of course the job of supplying energy for the airconditioner just sounds like a lot of work to me.
The scene where Antefalken walks around describing many modern conveniences really astound me. There are lot of issues with the idea of the Abyss using very obvious modern conveniences specifically when such devices should have trouble operating there. I always had thought it was extremely absurd but then the scene was rather short and not much of importance in the first book.
And oh! Where do demons get the water to mix all those concrete?
It was meant to be a shocker.
That was very much intentional, I’m actually a bit surprised more people haven’t commented on it.
It shouldn’t really add up or make a lot of sense. The demons have some [i]tricks[/i] up their sleeves (Exador isn’t the only demon to know how to use Abyssal Switch spells) Very little of what you see was built, stuff that’s built tends to be more medieval or older. And as I’ve said some is just crappy facade, some illusion.
The thing to keep in mind is that these higher level demons are OLD, thousands of years old. They make most the vampires in other fiction look like children.
They’ve had a lot of time, a lot of minions and a lot of planes of various tech and magic levels to raid.
Gods don’t usually venture to high tech realms because of the lower mana and too many atheists to bother recruting, but demons that’s another story.
So anyway: lets assume demons are making concrete, they’d make it on some other plane/planet, create prefabricated blocks and zap it in.
Although I really don’t think this happens that much.
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