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:::::::::::::::Thanks, that's a tad more constructive than the previous iteration (I mean, really? "move their fences out a few yards every year", when the flight path of an airborne seed clearly isn't limited to "a few yards" in any particular direction?). I am still not a big fan of the manual, though, and there would be quite a contrast between the dignified TCTF and the "poor bastards [...] who beat back the corrosive stain of the wilderness". Even if the "reclamation teams" are an official initiative of the WCG, it all seems a bit half-hearted and desperate (although it may look good in propaganda: "See? We're aware of your stupid eco-issues, and we actually have a task force that picks at it 24/7!"), and it doesn't quite match the idea of a top-secret WCG initiative that I had in my mind (not sure about you). But, if we must, then this can be an interesting take on the WCG's penal system: is there capital punishment? or does the WCG favor "death by exile" instead? and/or are the outcasts forced (more or less formally) into slave-like labor in the "reclamation teams" (as the manual entry would suggest)? P.S. The outer "and" conjunction in the manual quote looks like it could/should have been an "or", otherwise it would mean that the day-to-day reclamation struggle is happening right at the doors of every big city -- and that would be kinda hard to overlook, even if you leave out the "alien" nature of the contamination as per SoW. I would insist on the "or" here ("get as close to the atmosphere processors as they can ''or'' eke out a miserable existence working on the reclamation teams"), i.e., separate the slums at the outskirts of ACC-protected areas from the "bio-trenches" (if any) that surround the most virulent and aggressive Wilderness Preserves. It remains to be debated why/how the Hasegawas were able to waltz right into a Contaminated Zone virtually unprotected, oblivious of any reclamation protocol that there may have been (unless maybe there wasn't any at the time, and Jamie's death was one of the first swallows? in any case, the rationalization of the Bio-Crisis would need some more work). --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 20:42, 27 July 2020 (CEST)
:::::::::::::::Thanks, that's a tad more constructive than the previous iteration (I mean, really? "move their fences out a few yards every year", when the flight path of an airborne seed clearly isn't limited to "a few yards" in any particular direction?). I am still not a big fan of the manual, though, and there would be quite a contrast between the dignified TCTF and the "poor bastards [...] who beat back the corrosive stain of the wilderness". Even if the "reclamation teams" are an official initiative of the WCG, it all seems a bit half-hearted and desperate (although it may look good in propaganda: "See? We're aware of your stupid eco-issues, and we actually have a task force that picks at it 24/7!"), and it doesn't quite match the idea of a top-secret WCG initiative that I had in my mind (not sure about you). But, if we must, then this can be an interesting take on the WCG's penal system: is there capital punishment? or does the WCG favor "death by exile" instead? and/or are the outcasts forced (more or less formally) into slave-like labor in the "reclamation teams" (as the manual entry would suggest)? P.S. The outer "and" conjunction in the manual quote looks like it could/should have been an "or", otherwise it would mean that the day-to-day reclamation struggle is happening right at the doors of every big city -- and that would be kinda hard to overlook, even if you leave out the "alien" nature of the contamination as per SoW. I would insist on the "or" here ("get as close to the atmosphere processors as they can ''or'' eke out a miserable existence working on the reclamation teams"), i.e., separate the slums at the outskirts of ACC-protected areas from the "bio-trenches" (if any) that surround the most virulent and aggressive Wilderness Preserves. It remains to be debated why/how the Hasegawas were able to waltz right into a Contaminated Zone virtually unprotected, oblivious of any reclamation protocol that there may have been (unless maybe there wasn't any at the time, and Jamie's death was one of the first swallows? in any case, the rationalization of the Bio-Crisis would need some more work). --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 20:42, 27 July 2020 (CEST)
::::::::::::::::I think I need to walk you through what I'm trying to say about the spread of the zones referred to as Wilderness Preserves, according to my take on the story. Let me ask you, if a "daodandelion" seed floats 300 yards outside the Preserve, settles somewhere and takes root, what happens? The answer is nothing. Very slowly, the dandelion may spread further with each generation, but it's still just a few tiny plants. There's no crisis there. If the WCG moves its fences out each year, it's only to capture the lion's share of the new zone. They're not going to capture everything within that new zone, and that's kind of the point: that it's not totally under control. I never stated, implied, or thought that these Daodan-powered plants are growing overnight, or growing ten feet tall. So there was nothing wrong with my suggestion. If you still think you see a problem with it, then please be more specific, or ask questions rather than trying to mind-read my notion of the Wilderness. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 22:09, 27 July 2020 (CEST)
::::::::::::::::I think I need to walk you through what I'm trying to say about the spread of the zones referred to as Wilderness Preserves, according to my take on the story. Let me ask you, if a "daodandelion" seed floats 300 yards outside the Preserve, settles somewhere and takes root, what happens? The answer is nothing. Very slowly, the dandelion may spread further with each generation, but it's still just a few tiny plants. There's no crisis there. If the WCG moves its fences out each year, it's only to capture the lion's share of the new zone. They're not going to capture everything within that new zone, and that's kind of the point: that it's not totally under control. I never stated, implied, or thought that these Daodan-powered plants are growing overnight, or growing ten feet tall. So there was nothing wrong with my suggestion. If you still think you see a problem with it, then please be more specific, or ask questions rather than trying to mind-read my notion of the Wilderness. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 22:09, 27 July 2020 (CEST)
:::::::::::::::::I don't have to mind-read anything. You already said in no uncertain terms that it's all "up to us". In your view, the Wilderness can be as scary as you need it to be -- eventually --, but not one minute too soon. I, in turn, have made it clear that such "flexibility" is not much to my liking, because (to me) entities need to have a life of their own, without doing a writer's bidding all the time. If I were to ask a question, it would be about your initial statement from the "Wilderness Preserves" section, the one that starts with "any xeno-dandelion seed that lands in a field could start the whole species growing": would you like to recall or amend anything in that whole paragraph? any reason why the fences wouldn't need to be shifted by a few ''miles'' every year, rather than yards? (also, what about super-windy days?) --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 17:09, 28 July 2020 (CEST)  
:::::::::::::::::I don't have to mind-read anything. You already said in no uncertain terms that it's all "up to us". In your view, the Wilderness can be as scary as you need it to be -- eventually --, but not one minute too soon. I, in turn, have made it clear that such "flexibility" is not much to my liking, because (to me) entities need to have a life of their own, without doing a writer's bidding all the time. If I were to ask a question, it would be about your initial statement from the "Wilderness Preserves" section, the one that starts with "any xeno-dandelion seed that lands in a field could start the whole species growing": would you like to recall or amend anything in that whole paragraph? any reason why the fences wouldn't need to be shifted by a few ''miles'' every year, rather than yards? (also, what about super-windy days?) --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 17:09, 28 July 2020 (CEST)
::::::::::::::::::It's some kind of cruelty to make me keep repeating myself. I'm not dismissing the issue of airborne seeds because it's inconvenient for my story concept. There's simply no reason to think that a daodandelion spreading itself is a huge issue. The BioCrisis is caused (in my story) by the advancement of a ''foreign ecosystem'', not a single plant. To the degree that the ''ecosystem'' — an interlocking mass of life — is visibly observed to have spread from one month/year to the next, the border around the Wilderness must either be moved back or the tendrils of Wilderness reaching outside the fence must be torched by reclamation teams. This large-scale effort has little to do with a few small plants outside of the zone which are not necessarily harmful or spreading super-fast. And again, if the Wilderness was totally containable then there would be little to drive the plot, so of course the fact that these plants will inevitably spread themselves is desirable from our storytelling standpoint. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 19:20, 28 July 2020 (CEST)
::::::::::::::::::P.S.: You say you don't like the idea of arbitrarily determining how fast these plants would spread, but that's exactly what you yourself are doing, and then claiming that this arbitrary rate is too high. Why are you doing this? Oni's world is a fictional one, and not subject to known science since we are invoking phase tech, alien life, and the Daodan. Therefore everything is up in the air, and anything that we decide only has to be self-consistent and plausible for the audience. It's much more plausible to say that the daodandelions are doing little harm than to posit that somehow the xeno-life only spreads via a root system, which I assume is what you mean by "vegetatively". --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 19:20, 28 July 2020 (CEST)
::::::::::::::::Secondly, you're reading the manual's sentence too literally. The poor people who can't live within an ACC's main area of effect live in something like a shantytown outside city limits. The job that some of them have is going to work every day fighting against the spread of the BioCrisis. That doesn't mean the Wilderness is right outside the cities. It just means that they have a rough job and that they live on the edge of the habitable zone. I'm sure that "and" was really meant there. What the sentence doesn't tell us how far they commute to work each day. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 22:09, 27 July 2020 (CEST)
::::::::::::::::Secondly, you're reading the manual's sentence too literally. The poor people who can't live within an ACC's main area of effect live in something like a shantytown outside city limits. The job that some of them have is going to work every day fighting against the spread of the BioCrisis. That doesn't mean the Wilderness is right outside the cities. It just means that they have a rough job and that they live on the edge of the habitable zone. I'm sure that "and" was really meant there. What the sentence doesn't tell us how far they commute to work each day. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 22:09, 27 July 2020 (CEST)
:::::::::::::::::Off-road commuting for hundreds of miles has to be the worst job ever, indeed. Your point is clear, and I don't think there is any radical disagreement here (if anything, I said there's some welcome food for thought). However, like for the airborne spreading, it all boils down to quantitative considerations VS qualitative ones. I am a scientist at heart and by trade, so yeah, I tend to: a) read that kind of stuff literally; b) favor basic logic and math over figures of speech. On the face of it, the manual says that there are people living at the edge of atmospheric-processed areas, with "dead air and foul water" right next door: settle any further out, and the toxic air/water will start causing gruesome diseases and birth defects (that's just what the "edge of the habitable zone" is, by definition). Seen that way, it makes total sense for the "reclamation teams" to be hard at work right outside the shantytowns, "beating back" the limits of their ''own'' habitat (as well as helping to preserve the air quality in an ACC's "main area of effect"). That said, if the actual source of the contamination is identified as being located far outside the city limits, rather than adjacent to the slums, then indeed it makes sense to have "commuters" who wander towards the Wilderness Preserves and stamp out whatever is causing the toxicity to spread (although I am not sure the term "reclamation teams" would be fitting for this kind of task -- they'd be more like "excisors", "surgeons", "foresters" or, yes, "stalkers"). My key point, if I may reiterate it, is that, if this latter "stalking" occupation is even more precarious than that of the reclamation teams (the ones that merely decontaminate the areas around the slums that they live in), then -- as I already said -- this supposed WPTF comes across as much more humble than the dignified TCTF (despite a supposedly comparable importance of the two initiatives), and it may not fit in too well with the idea that there's this big high-level conspiracy surrounding the Wilderness. It can work, but it will require some new statements: about the WCG's penal system, about the not-so-free circulation of people or information between the inner cities and the slums, etc. If, on the other hand, the Wilderness expands only marginally (vegetative reproduction?), and there is no need for daily monitoring by a "WPTF" (precarious or otherwise), then the sentence from the manual is just about "reclamation teams" that are decontaminating areas right outside the slums, and that's it. It can work either way, and I don't feel like I'm closing any doors at this point. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 17:09, 28 July 2020 (CEST)
:::::::::::::::::Off-road commuting for hundreds of miles has to be the worst job ever, indeed. Your point is clear, and I don't think there is any radical disagreement here (if anything, I said there's some welcome food for thought). However, like for the airborne spreading, it all boils down to quantitative considerations VS qualitative ones. I am a scientist at heart and by trade, so yeah, I tend to: a) read that kind of stuff literally; b) favor basic logic and math over figures of speech. On the face of it, the manual says that there are people living at the edge of atmospheric-processed areas, with "dead air and foul water" right next door: settle any further out, and the toxic air/water will start causing gruesome diseases and birth defects (that's just what the "edge of the habitable zone" is, by definition). Seen that way, it makes total sense for the "reclamation teams" to be hard at work right outside the shantytowns, "beating back" the limits of their ''own'' habitat (as well as helping to preserve the air quality in an ACC's "main area of effect"). That said, if the actual source of the contamination is identified as being located far outside the city limits, rather than adjacent to the slums, then indeed it makes sense to have "commuters" who wander towards the Wilderness Preserves and stamp out whatever is causing the toxicity to spread (although I am not sure the term "reclamation teams" would be fitting for this kind of task -- they'd be more like "excisors", "surgeons", "foresters" or, yes, "stalkers"). My key point, if I may reiterate it, is that, if this latter "stalking" occupation is even more precarious than that of the reclamation teams (the ones that merely decontaminate the areas around the slums that they live in), then -- as I already said -- this supposed WPTF comes across as much more humble than the dignified TCTF (despite a supposedly comparable importance of the two initiatives), and it may not fit in too well with the idea that there's this big high-level conspiracy surrounding the Wilderness. It can work, but it will require some new statements: about the WCG's penal system, about the not-so-free circulation of people or information between the inner cities and the slums, etc. If, on the other hand, the Wilderness expands only marginally (vegetative reproduction?), and there is no need for daily monitoring by a "WPTF" (precarious or otherwise), then the sentence from the manual is just about "reclamation teams" that are decontaminating areas right outside the slums, and that's it. It can work either way, and I don't feel like I'm closing any doors at this point. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 17:09, 28 July 2020 (CEST)
::::::::::::::::::There is room for this alternative suggestion, I'll admit. It could be that, rather than the world being mostly Earthlike and only alien/hostile in patches designated as Preserves, the world could be mostly hostile outside of the cities, with only a few manmade oases that are inhabitable. In that case, yes, the poor would be the front-line soldiers, with the accompanying risk, in the battle against the encroaching Wilderness. This does not feel compatible, however, with the picture that Oni paints when it talks about Preserves that people are kept out of. Most significantly, ''Oni's cities are not domed''. The standard sci-fi trope of walled-in cities is not present here, as shown by the sky(boxes) above Konoko and the fact that the poor are able to get some benefit by being near the ACCs while outside the cities. If the Wilderness was all around the unwalled cities, it would not only be obvious to the citizens (as you pointed out), but running the ACCs without a dome would be as stupid as running your AC without walls on your house. Gonna take a while to cool the whole world down…. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 19:20, 28 July 2020 (CEST)
::::::::::It may seem naive of the WCG to think they can contain the Wilderness, but they might know full well that it's a losing battle. They also are taking steps to contain the growing Wilderness, but clearly they're losing since the toxins in the air are increasing, according to Oni. Also, to whatever degree they're wrong about how well they have it contained, that's our way of adding some drama to the story. Finding out that the trophic level of the Wilderness is advancing to herbivores, insectivores, and then carnivores will be an alarming development. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 21:01, 22 June 2020 (CEST)
::::::::::It may seem naive of the WCG to think they can contain the Wilderness, but they might know full well that it's a losing battle. They also are taking steps to contain the growing Wilderness, but clearly they're losing since the toxins in the air are increasing, according to Oni. Also, to whatever degree they're wrong about how well they have it contained, that's our way of adding some drama to the story. Finding out that the trophic level of the Wilderness is advancing to herbivores, insectivores, and then carnivores will be an alarming development. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 21:01, 22 June 2020 (CEST)
:::::::::::The [[Quotes/Consoles#STURMANDERUNG_:_Secondary_Stage|increasing air toxicity]] is one of the most ambiguous parts of Oni canon. Not only does it involve the infamous "36.18% increase" of Dioxin levels, but it seemingly presents the toxin rise as a consequence of Muro's retrofitting of the ACCs. At no point are the WPs stated as a prominent source of airborne toxins in Oni's world: all we have is "biological contamination" encountered during flyovers, and the uncanny "virus" from Jamie's bush. Of course it doesn't mean that toxins don't emanate from the Contaminated Zones at all, but it doesn't establish the WPs as the planet's "toxic lungs", either. If anything, I'd blame a WCG-era toxin rise (pre-Muro) on imperfect waste processing procedures at the ACCs. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 23:47, 29 June 2020 (CEST)
:::::::::::The [[Quotes/Consoles#STURMANDERUNG_:_Secondary_Stage|increasing air toxicity]] is one of the most ambiguous parts of Oni canon. Not only does it involve the infamous "36.18% increase" of Dioxin levels, but it seemingly presents the toxin rise as a consequence of Muro's retrofitting of the ACCs. At no point are the WPs stated as a prominent source of airborne toxins in Oni's world: all we have is "biological contamination" encountered during flyovers, and the uncanny "virus" from Jamie's bush. Of course it doesn't mean that toxins don't emanate from the Contaminated Zones at all, but it doesn't establish the WPs as the planet's "toxic lungs", either. If anything, I'd blame a WCG-era toxin rise (pre-Muro) on imperfect waste processing procedures at the ACCs. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 23:47, 29 June 2020 (CEST)
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