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

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Geyser

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 :::My speculation, or rather my latest take on this, is that there may have been ordinary landfills and such in some of the Zones early on, but most of the pollution appeared (unnoticed at first?) after some Phase experiments (in the early years where Phase tech was poorly regulated and rather hazardous). Either secret labs (testing grounds) deep in the "jungle", or teleportations gone wrong, as described previously. That's close enough to SoW, actually, since (correct me if I'm wrong) the xenoforming invasion would have needed a transdimensional portal of some sort to have appeared in each of the Preserves at some point. My "guess" about how the teleported samples (waste bins, neo-Laikas or otherwise) may have been "alienated" during the teleport, resulting in "unearthly" contamination wherever the "boomerang" hit -- that's also close to SoW, wouldn't you say? --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 00:25, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
 ::::Yes, that's a pretty accurate summation. I left my premise a bit open-ended. One possibility is that the area beyond the phase veil is another planet or universe (the idea that Hardy no doubt had in mind). But plot twists can come from additional revelations later on, such as "They're actually from right here on Earth, in the distant past." The final twist I suggested was that it turns out, last-minute as the full-on invasion is happening, that they're actually not even from the past… they're right here, under the oceans. The time stuff was either a feint or a (rare) errant assumption by Mai. The aliens are from the distant past but have been in suspended animation the entire time, and are using the portals to seed the land with their alien life. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 01:13, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
-::::The alien life, by the way, doesn't really need to be seeded carefully or secretly; being Daodan-powered, any xeno-dandelion seed that lands in a field could start the whole species growing. All that's needed is for humans not to notice for a while and it's too late. The WCG knows about the incursion, terming it a BioCrisis, blaming it on pollution, and using it as an excuse to establish world hegemony, but they can't watch everywhere at once. The areas that "go to seed" before WCG can catch them are cordoned off as Wilderness Preserves. (Note that the name makes a lot more sense if the Preserves aren't just a big wasteland with discarded industrial pollution in them, which would be obvious from satellite imagery. It really is a wilderness; the WCG just isn't saying ''whose'' Wilderness it is….) --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 01:13, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
+::::The alien life, by the way, doesn't really need to be seeded carefully or secretly; being Daodan-powered, any xeno-dandelion seed that lands in a field could start the whole species growing. All that's needed is for humans not to notice for a while and it's too late. The WCG knows about the incursion, terming it a BioCrisis, blaming it on pollution, and using it as an excuse to establish world hegemony, but they can't watch everywhere at once. The areas that "go to seed" before WCG can catch them are cordoned off as Wilderness Preserves. (Note that the name makes a lot more sense if the Preserves aren't just a big wasteland with discarded industrial pollution in them, which would be obvious from satellite imagery. It really is a wilderness; the WCG just isn't saying ''whose'' Wilderness it is…) --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 01:13, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
 ::::For more on how the Wilderness has to spread in order to prepare the way for Earth's original masters to live on it again, see the second bullet point [[Oni2:Slaves_of_War/Polylectiloquy#What_would_Oni_2_be_about.3F|here]] and then [[Oni2:Slaves_of_War/Neo-Biology#Nature_and_origin|this part]] of my Neo-Biology page. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 01:13, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
+:::::I'm a big disliker of time-traveling in sci-fi (mainly because of how we're all sitting on a rock that's careening through space, so traveling forward in time even a split second would leave you in that rock's wake, gasping for air). If your "time travel" is actually akin to hibernation, then of course it works better. However, in that case, I'd say the Daodan doesn't need to be time-traveling either. The "Oldies" (or whatever you'd call them) would just pack daodandelion seeds into time capsules that say "Do not open until X-Mas 1999", and voilà. Phase? What for? --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 02:58, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
+:::::The only problem then is, I'm no longer sure that it's still Oni that we're talking about and not some Mass Effect DLC (with timeless Leviathans at the bottom of oceans, or Reapers chilling in the darkness of space until it's "time to collect"). I know you're convinced that the dying Jamie (as dreamed up by Konoko) looks kinda like Barabas, but drawing a parallel between Jamie's complete cellular breakdown and Mai's or Muro's integrity-preserving symbiosis is a bit of a stretch even by my standards. You seem to imply that the "flowering shrub" is Daodan-enhanced (like Konoko? or in some other way that Oni says nothing about?), and Jamie, not having the same DNA signature as the shrub, is destroyed upon contact with its Chrysalis instead of being "reinforced or replaced". So how does this feed back into Oni? If Konoko spits in Griffin's face, does he rot alive in minutes? is that how it works? --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 02:58, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
+:::::Mostly agree about the Wilderness Preserves being mostly overgrown -- not like a large dump can't be covered in greenery, mind you, or covered-up by limiting access to satellite imagery (Oni's space programs are not the same as NASA's and ESA's, so we don't know what satellites they had in orbit before the Uprising, and who was running them). At any rate, Hasegawa's tale is really telling us that "the world outside the ACCs is poisonous" so, at least in the one Zone that he and Jamie set foot into, the virus (or whatever) had apparently "gone to seed" in most of the Zone's lifeforms. This is not telling us that the virus (or whatever) didn't spread from a man-made container discarded somewhere deep in the forest, or from a secret underground lab, or from an enigmatic phase portal (or xenoforming time capsule). Like I said earlier, Zones (Preserves) don't all have to look the same or kill their local Jamies in the same fashion. It's only your own Wilderness fixation that's giving you that idea. (For what it's worth, would Jamie's Zone cause "biological contamination" on a plane passing overhead, that would be immediately noticed and reported by pilots? I wouldn't be so sure.) --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 02:58, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
+:::::Last but not least, "alien invasions" (doesn't matter if they're space aliens or time aliens or phase aliens) is one of the big caveats of sci-fi for me, if not one of the big no-nos. No matter how unfathomable and unfamiliar you're trying to picture them, they always come across as sock puppets and man-made "golems" (poor copies of ourselves) from the moment they appear on screen. If they turn out to be "bad guys", then the tropes get even worse. I probably could name more than a few exceptions to that rule (good sci-fi with believable aliens, and even with a convincing enough "invasion" going on), but the point is, I'm picky as hell when it comes to those things. The Screamer Queen mentioned by Hardy(?) I would probably tolerate because she'd be all immaterial and hungry, and probably would just equate to (super)natural disaster. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 02:58, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
+:::::That said, I plead guilty myself -- I imagined an alien race a while back and had been thinking of ways of incorporating them into the Oni universe... as invaders. The Daodan, in that "story", would have been helping Mankind to prepare -- by hyperevolving -- so that they'd survive the encounter with the "actual" enemy all the way in Oni 3. From what I recall those "other aliens" were going to be powerful-but-stupid, kinda like furry zerglings. Good times... --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 02:58, 9 June 2020 (CEST)
 :Having the WCG instituted in 2012 also feels a bit weird, with Jamie dying in 2014 and Chrysalises already grown in 2016 -- it just doesn't leave much time for the TCTF's regulations to have kicked in, or for the Network to have already evolved into "The Syndicate" by the time Hasegawa and Kerr start working there. --[[User:Geyser|geyser]] ([[User talk:Geyser|talk]]) 18:42, 7 June 2020 (CEST)
 ::The only awkwardly-tight timing is the development of the Daodan Chrysalis, which itself is not hard to explain if one assumes that (a) Hasegawa and Kerr had relevant prior experience, (b) the technology of the time was close enough to what they needed that they didn't have to advance all of science by a human lifespan in 3 years, and (c) they ''found'' the Daodan, rather than creating it. --[[User:Iritscen|Iritscen]] ([[User talk:Iritscen|talk]]) 02:59, 8 June 2020 (CEST)