Member
hanzo
Phase
Marlowe
LadyAnnaLee
Atalanta
Alby47
Abstract Proxy
Skwint
Auz
ZygfrytHeya! Thanks for replying! I, er, have more questions now, though.
- The coastline of Britain is almost 20,000 miles long. That rather makes me wonder how one being can be anything other than a retaliatory action, rather than a line of defense. Is the Chimera responsible for monitoring the coast? What power allows it to do that, or did The Order build some kind of sensing network? What if someone teleports away, or has gills and swims away?
- Regardless of the spectacular ability of the Rifters to alter their environment, there are very basic things that I'm not seeing. Being able to transmute sundered mud into asphalt and buildings is wonderful, of course. However, building a city is extraordinarily hard. Doctor Manhattan thought himself a gorgeous palace of glass on the surface of Mars, but when he brought his girlfriend there she immediately started to choke on the thin Martian atmosphere. While the palace was undoubtably a marvel, for all his vast intelligence, Manhattan had not considered that someone who was not not him would need air to breathe. While that's also for narrative weight (demonstrating that Manhattan was fundamnetally losing connection to humanity) it parallels nicely here - Manhattan's palace also had no chairs, no beds, no toilets. Is having a Fluid-Transmutation Rifter really preferable to a wastewater treatment plant? How long is that person (or people) going to want to be on the rota for making sure people don't get cholera? Having the ability to do extraordinary things is very cool, but harnessing that with plans, knowledge of how much weight a wall can take, how to build a pump, or what the minimum head pressure is to provide enough water for a shower is the absolutely necessary other half of the equation.
Being able to turn mud into steel and granite is wonderful, but without the engineering design to build a skyscraper, the architecture craft to make it beautiful, knowledge of electrical code to keep the lights on (not to mention the intricate understanding of how to build light bulbs), interior design to make sure people want to live there, and the thousand other disciplines that go into that one building but the galaxy of infrastructure to keep it livable, all you have is a bunch of people failing to stack one block of stone on top of another one. And even if there's a Rifter who's managed to keep the sum of all human knowledge in their head and does know how to do all of these things, what happens when they die? Furthermore, since the enclaves are separated, how is that knowledge transferred? Does each enclave have one of these people?
I guess the real question is this: Is the presupposition of this setting one where there are enough Rifters who know how to completely rebuild nations in each of the Rifter Enclaves? Are the Enclaves each supposed to be third-world countries and refugee camps? If you tell me "they're basically cities and it's fine get over it," I can probably manage that.
Right now, though, I admit I'm having a very hard time seeing past a lot of ugliness. "Making the best of things" when you don't have running water, and you did less than a decade ago, and you are being denied the expertise to build out running water (because of The Order's blockade and shoot-to-kill/release the murderous cannibal hunter-killer attitude at the border), is going to make for a situation that starts ugly and becomes uglier. I feel like you're positing a world where there weren't a lot of Rifters in the first place, who were given powers functionally at random and who are now cut off from the outside world. The land they have been "given" is a war-torn wasteland. Virtually all Rifters are going to have PTSD from a year-long war in which many of them seem to have been necessarily involved, and they are now separated into different enclaves, which are in turn under the threat of roving gangs and some of which border a nation-state where you are murdered and dismembered for straying over the border. And all of that is on top of the constant threat of The Order making a unilateral decision that the Rifters aren't worth the trouble and just turning the Chimera loose, nuking the place, or doing whatever their apparently-superior force is capable of. As written this is not a compromise or detente, it is the systematic oppression and isolation of one group by another, under the threat of unilateral, immediate, horrific and lethal action without trial or appeal. People aren't generally well-designed to sit under that kind of Sword of Damocles and be "happy." This is less Harry Potter-style "one world isolated from another" and more "dystopian extension of fundamental social inequality," and if that's the intention I feel like you might have to own that a bit more.
Again, if the fundamental baseline here is that the Rifters have made a basically-modern, basically-functional society because of staggering luck in having the right people (several copies of them really) who weren't killed in the war or left psychologically broken, fine. I personally find that extremely unlikely, but I'll go with it if that's the basic idea here. The reason I'm jumping up and down on this is that timeline as presented is such that these aren't people who were born into the Rifter's enclaves and haven't known anything else. The characters are going to be people who remember having Facebook and iPhones and convenience stores and therapists and gyms and trains and air travel and a nice view over the lake and the chip shop down the lane they liked and the cute barista who they never got up the courage to ask on a date. If these things have all been stripped away, that has a cost. If they have to live in a functional but basically feudal society (which it kind of sounds like - no electricity, no way to make clean water that isn't traders or having a lucky Rifter around, etc.) that also has a toll. If they are being denied the ability to live that modern life because of The Order's blockade (by implicit or explicit withholding of important knowledge or access to information - by refusing to allow an Internet connection and preventing the import of books and technical manuals, for example), that's the kind of thing that creates nothing-to-lose rebellions, and I'd really like to know what the assumption is here.
- What happened to the Rifters who worked with The Order in the war? Were they thrown into the gulag with everyone else, or are they given special dispensation to live among normal people? Are they monitored 24/7 with the threat of The Chimera if they step out of line? Do they have any particular legal protections in case, say, a lynch mob forms and they have to use their powers to prevent themselves from being murdered? Are they specifically restricted from doing so and live under the tacit threat of The Order's citizens taking out their anger for a war that cost millions(?) of lives on their Neighborhood Mutant?
I'll absolutely have more, but I've got to get to work myself.