SlickRiptide

Not to totally derail the conversation, but am I to understand that Miss Liberty, i.e. Alexis Cole, has been killed?

Now, about that Commando Cody rocket pack...

The premiere was interesting. It's a relaunch of Lincoln Lee, which they went to some pains to have the Watchers point out explicitly. I was sort of disappointed that Fauxlivia didn't at least smirk at meeting an alternate to her Lincoln, but then she treats Olivia as some sort of cosmic joke. It's always been interesting to me that the people on the Other Side have no empathy at all for their analogs. I suppose that's actually realistic, but it always strikes me as some sort of statement about the humanity of the Other Side.

Peter's "bleeding through" is a puzzle. In the previews for next week, we hear Peter saying "Walter, I'm here." It implies that Peter exists on some level and that it's more than just some kind of "bleeding through" of the previous timeline.

I'm still not sure what to make of the Watchers, their goals, or their actions.

Their interference led directly to the fracturing of the universes.

Let's recap:

The Watchers are at most or all of the major events related to the Pattern, which is the outward expression of both the activities of Walter Beta (aka Walternate) and his minions, and the gradual deterioration of the boundaries of the universe itself. Their agenda appears to be both to observe and record history, and to act as curators who "set right what once went wrong" in the timeline of one or both worlds.

Walter Alpha (aka Walter) discovers Beta and concocts devices to open a window and then a door into Beta.

Walter watches Peter Alpha die despite his efforts to find a cure.

Walter watches Walternate attempt the same search for a cure. The Watcher appears, desiring a closer look at a seminal moment in time and he inadvertently disrupts the moment he came to observe. Walter, however, is also observing and unable to stand watching Peter die a second time, he resolves to synthesize the cure himself and take it to Peter Beta (aka, Peter).

The Watchers upbraid their compatriot for disturbing the timeline, but the leader tells him that he will have a chance to set things right.

Walter accidentally loses the formula in the fall on the ice. Rather than turn back, he resolves to bring Peter back to Alpha where he has more of the formula. (The smart thing to do at this point would have been to write it down and hand it to Walternate,but I suppose that Walter can be forgiven for not thinking straight about it.)

The Watcher saves Walter and Peter from drowning in Alpha. This patently does not return things to the situation they would have been in had there been no interference by the Watchers, so "setting things right" appears to mean "insuring that Peter lives".

The Watchers test Walter and determine that he is willing to let Peter pursue his destiny rather than try to save him from it. What they would have done had that not been the case is left undefined.

It's demonstrated that the Watchers appear to be able to traverse time as well as traverse both universes. Why this ability does not let them just undo the original interference is unexplained.

The Watchers appear to care only that Peter enters the machine; not which universe he does it in. The final goal is apparently met when Peter bridges the two universes and consequently for unexplained reasons this re-writes the timeline of both universes and Peter is written out of existence.

It appears implied that the Watchers were responsible for Peter living past childhood in the first place and are satisfied to have him "gone" now that his usefulness is at an end. Re-writing time is a messy business, though, and the Universe apparently prefers a different energy state because it is attempting to reassert Peter into being.

The Watcher associated with Peter over the course of the series is shown to have apparently become attached to him similarly to the one Watcher who gave his life to insure the life of the girl that he had Watched for her entire life. When faced with the duty of erasing the echoes of Peter from the time stream, he chooses instead to do nothing.

None of this really explains anything about what the Watchers originally wanted. Suppose that Walternate had not been distracted - He would have cured Peter himself, and Walter would not have crossed over at that time. Perhaps, he would have crossed over at a later time or Bell would have, with some unknown consequences? We don't know. We only know that the Watchers wanted Peter alive to turn on the machine and use it and they didn't care about how that was accomplished.

Then there's the question of how the machine arrived in both universes, but I think we end up doing some hand-waving there: Essentially, in the past era where the machine came to rest, there was not yet two universes. That is, the idea of branching universes stems from the idea that a decision is made in one universe that goes differently in the other and the two fork away from each other at that decision point. By sending the machine into the far past, it was sent to the "root" of the tree that produced both universes, before they had forked apart.

As far as I can tell, this explains many things without ever actually explaining the central thing - What do the Watchers actually want?

Actually, my biggest question after watching the pilot is the one that Taylor had for the father - Why break the population law in the first place? No good answer was given, which implies to me that there IS an answer that's going to be involved with some kind of big "reveal" later in the story.

An obvious speculation would be that someone in the family has a genetic disorder that requires a contribution from the third child to treat. How you do that in the Jurassic, I'm not sure, though, so I suppose it may end up being something non-medical.

In the novel _Timeline_, Michael Crichton dealt with the the time travel paradox by envisioning that the traveler does in fact visit a universe next door, but it's one so similar that the difference is undetectable. Like, say, one where everything is identical except that a coin flip came up heads instead of tails a drop of rain landed a little to the left or the right of where it landed in the next door universe.

In that scenario,the Traveler from Universe A visits a point in the past in Universe B. Meanwhile the analog Traveler from Universe Z visits the same point in time in Universe A and undergoes substantially the same experience as A experiences with the same consequences. They both return to their respective homes and the evidence of their activities exists (presumably there's a Y who arrives in Universe Z). For all intents and purposes, they've traveled to their own pasts and interacted with them. Short of somehow identifying a cosmic signature that identifies what universe a thing originated in, there's no qualitative difference between traveling to the universe next door and traveling to your own actual past.

It was a rather elegant way of dealing with the whole business while still basically telling a standard time travel story. He also addressed the Star Trek transporter paradox - That is, if you destroy a person and reassemble them, can you say it's really the same person?

Anyway, Terra Nova - Even if it was the "real" past (and apparently it's not) I'm not sure it would matter. The ability to travel to the past means that there's some kind of cosmic meta-framework that allows the past to actually have some kind of persistent existence. If that's the case, then the ability to time travel precludes paradox in the first place. Everything that will happen does happen, including the time travel. You can't change the past; you can only fulfill it. If you appear to change the past, it's only because when you "went back to the future" you actually shunted yourself into a different universe on your return trip and not because you actually altered the state of affairs in your original origin point.

In any case - I'm not sure that the government(s) behind the colony would care. Butterfly effect aside, 85 million years is so far back that the colony's descendants would have to survive and thrive for many hundreds or thousands of times longer than mankind has been in existence in order to make much of a dent.

In fact, if I was the person who proposed the initial colony, I might well look to folkore about Mu and Atlantis and say "See? We have to do this. Those legends are about US.

The comet might even be viewed as a safety switch that protects the future from the colony. Let's face it - The whole of recorded human history (barring cave paintings) is around 8-10 thousand years. The fossil history of **** Sapiens is around 100,000 to 200,000 years. If you're buying the species twenty MILLION years then I don't think people are going to be too awfully worried about the whole ELE business.

I find that clicking the riot shield does the trick. I don't believe that I've ever had to crotch click, though I seldom visit hazard zones any more so I suppose it's possible that one of them requires it.

Conceptually, the iTrials are the equivalent of what other games do when they raise the level cap and give you a bunch of new raids which you run endlessly in order to acquire new gear that makes your old gear obsolete. The reason for acquiring the new gear is, of course, how it looks and the fact that you need the new gear to run the new raids efficiently.

The only new thing is that we wave our hands about how we're not really raising the level cap (even though the effect is more or less comparable) and we drop currency that's used to buy/craft the loot instead of dropping the loot directly.

Since every iTrial is essentially a mini-expansion and a virtual raising of the power ceiling, I expect that every new iTrial will continue to be accompanied by it's own custom currency. The alternative is to be like everyone else and drop costume bits and what-not as loot.

The only saving grace in the whole thing is that nobody actually needs to ever become an incarnate.

Well, in most ways it's already an entirely different game.

How does Stardiver feel about sending text messages?

Well, if you're going to treat the dialog literally, as a kind of challenge along the lines of "If I interact it's bad, but if I mainly accept directions/orders it's okay" then you're going to be hampered out of the starting gate.

You can't do Matt Habashy or Twinshot. I think you could reasonably do the sewer trial and then use your contact finder to contact David Wincott and do the Hollows. After that, just follow the contact finder - most of those missions are of the "Stuff is happening; I need you to go to this place and do that " variety. The exceptions might be Roy Cooling and the clone arcs. Once you hit level 20, some of the regular contacts will start opening up and I suppose that you can just do your best to pick missions that don't depend on more than "accept this mission".

You realize, of course, that Stardiver can NEVER call up a contact on the cell phone, yes? Good luck with that. ;-)

Have you seen the Peter Sellers movie "Being There"? It's about a boy raised into his late middle age in almost complete isolation except for television and the man who employed him as, essentially, a butler and later a caregiver. (There was also a cook/maid.) His one passion was gardening.

When the old man died, and Chance was turned out into the world, he had no effective way to communicate with other people outside of making allusions to gardening. Attempting to make sense of these pronouncements, people assigned their own wisdom to them and their own meanings instead of what he actually meant.

I picture that as being how my bug, Chrrrp, communicated most of the time. When the dialog tree said "Golly, gee! That's awful!", that wasn't my bug's line. That was the NPC's interpretation of "Chrrrp!". Who knows what Chrrrp himself was actually saying about it?

Sam;

The character trait "mute" only makes any sense from the perspective of RP with other players.

Treating missions as anything other than a kind of game mechanic is about like making an explanation for power proliferation that says that there were really and truly no radiation blasters in the world until a mad scientist turned on his plot device and messed with the nexus of all powers. It's an explanation of something that didn't need explaining and whose "explanation" was a complete facepalm. ("A Mad Scientist did it" is the new "A Wizard did it".)


Mission givers are a game mechanic. You don't need to treat them as anything other than that. Ignore the dialog trees. Assume that your character has a minimum ability to nod ("affirmative") or shake her head ("negative") and let it go at that. The game putting dialog on the screen doesn't have to mean that your character is literally speaking that dialog. My characters say "Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever" quite frequently when the game has them saying things like "How horrible! Let's teach those miscreants to respect life and the law!"

In truth, the character you've described would not work with mission NPC's, at all. She might go to the trouble of interacting with a detective once in order to get hold of a police scanner. In fact, I'd see that as her first priority, as it seems that she wants to be a hero and the police scanner would let her do that while honoring her "phobia". That and tip missions.

If you were being 100% true to her character, it's unlikely that she would interact with any contact who wasn't something odd or inanimate like TV or Slot Machine. I could see her maybe doing missions in the PvP zones, where it's pretty much just "Go do this, yes? Yes. Good."


***EDIT***

Just to show that (as this thread seems to show) that the concept of "mute" is more popular than you might expect, I'll relate my own experience with it. When insect wings became relatively common at Wentworth's, I made an insect character and seeded him with enough inf to purchase and make the wings. I imagined him to be a cricket or grasshopper that had been accidentally incorporated into a witch's spell and turned into a humanoid, man-sized bug. I left his intelligence level undefined but his defining trait was that he did not speak English. He just said "Chrrrp!" to everything.

When it came to missions, I just hand-waved the dialog and assumed that my bug just said what he always said, "Chrrrp!"

Other players actually seemed to get a kick out of it. I had expected to get some strange looks and certainly some "LOL RP'er!" but it was generally pretty easily accepted. The really funny thing - Through complete serendipity, someone else had started an Orkin Man at almost the exact same time. (Orkin is a business in the USA that is a pest prevention company. Bugs supposedly fear the Orkin Man. The player who created that hero had managed to do a recognizable version of the real Orkin Man uniform.)

Orkin Man was continually advertising his services, while Chrrp was "Chrrrp!"ing to broadcast and we had some really funny exchanges about how intelligent insects were exempt from Orkin services. Ha ha!

Well, I have to say that this:

"Now heroes and villains fight over the meteor shards, collecting samples as freelance agents to avoid direct conflict between Longbow and Arachnos that could touch off World War III."

has always been my favorite part about the official Shivan lore.

Nobody seems to be all that concerned about starting a global war these days...

It would be interesting if there was an Ouroboros mission that allowed you to cross paths with Detective Ghaly and fight off fifteen or sixteen elite boss Shivans.

Did you know: Stairways

One of the features of the new Atlas Park is that certain buildings have rooftop features. A few of these are enclosed, so that they cannot be reached from the outside, even by flying heroes.

How do you reach them?

Watch for a door like this one:



Click on a stairway door and you'll be taken to the top of the building or to a balcony or some similar spot that is otherwise inaccessible. Some are enclosed. Some are open-air. Some are are rooftop plazas and some are rooftop gardens. Explore around and see what you find.