Oni2 talk:Truth Number Zero/Course Of Events: Difference between revisions

:::::::::::::::::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)

:::::::::::::::::::Indeed invoking [[wp:Vegetative_reproduction]] probably isn't any less arbitrary than not invoking it and relying on "slow enough" airborne contamination instead. I'm not sure why I am making such a fuss, probably you've just been dismissive earlier on and I overreacted. Currently I am quite comfortable with the notion that, at the time of Oni's events, the WCG simply don't see the "biological contamination" growing out of control in any foreseeable future, and therefore aren't trying ''too'' hard to contain it. If I am reading you right, the visceral danger would come from the Wilderness spreading "up" (up the trophic levels) rather than outwards -- and that, indeed, would only happen in the fenced-off Zones where the xeno-ecosystem is oldest and most dense. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 04:26, 29 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)