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May is rolling her way to the library. It's not icy - in point of fact it's summer - but she's got an unhappy ankle from tripping yesterday and it's an accessible library and it's downhill on the way there and Ren will pick her up after. So, rolling.
a may in the moon kingdom
maybeso
"No, I just mean that if you wanted to get back the void-eaten people and they are in fact thoroughly eaten the easiest way conceptually would be something in the neighborhood of informational time travel."
maybeso
"You could maybe do something with backwards extrapolation if the place is deterministic enough and computational load isn't a factor."
maybeso
"I will probably also want to design in more stringent editorial constraints because, however convenient is for me, what the heck kinda world kidnaps rando teenagers and gives them root access. - Was English already vernacular when you appeared? Were you the first kid to show up?"
of-secret-night
"I wasn't the first. They spoke a different language before I showed up, but the way the translation works turns out to mean that the language spoken in the Kingdoms will tend over time to shift to match their respective monarchs. It took two centuries and was fascinating to watch. I'm not sure it's possible to entirely get rid of the effect outworlders have on the world, but I do think you might be able to - shore some things up, make them more resistant to change."
of-secret-night
"If I'd had the option at the time I would've changed the translation effect to something with less accidental cultural imperialism, but now that English is the common language of the Kingdoms I don't see that much would be gained by going back."
of-secret-night
She shakes her head. "I only know I wasn't the first because both the King and Queen obviously already had an idea of what an outworlder was going to be like and how they could use one before I showed up."
maybeso
"You're welcome. - Did you lose anything other than the body when it, uh, went home? Did it go home or did you just sorta stage it -"
of-secret-night
"Staged it. I knew in theory how I would have sent someone home who still had an outworlder's power, but I didn't have the power anymore and couldn't do it myself. When I lost that body I lost a little clarity on my memories from when it was my only one, but they've stayed stable since. The - mental architecture, I suppose - of the King and Queen has very long-term-stable memory storage, although it takes some effort to reach things from more than five centuries ago."
maybeso
"It seems like it has to be a meta-fact about how outworlder influence works that it lasted long enough for you to get the Queen as well as the king but not indefinitely and it's kind of an arbitrary meta-fact. Whence the meta-facts?"
of-secret-night
"'Not indefinitely' is because I was becoming something with a different relationship to reality; the fact that the transfer wasn't instantaneous is a common thread among acts of outworlder influence, they tend to be slow and subtle and gradual rather than taking effect all at once; I don't know why this one was so comparatively fast but my hypothesis is that the juxtaposition of my two natures was - an uncomfortable state for the world, like holding two magnets together when they want to jump apart."